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AE

Since this AE report morphed into repeated insinuations there is some antisemitic clique of anti-Israel editors, of which (I am cited in the evidence by a certain Walt Yoder as being one), and since I cannot comment there, I should just note that the big divide in this area is between those who insist on very high quality sources, on comprehensive topic reading, and on collaborative searching for materials that are difficult to access to write those articles, etc. Secondly, they prioritize Israeli and diaspora scholarship as the, by the nature of the field, default source for our best information on the I/P area, be it historical, social or otherwise. Then there are those who, in my view at least, approach the subject with a standard collection of memes that have semi-official status in Israeli discourse. I'd say rough 99% of the 100+socks who have over 15 years repeatedly tried to influence the shaping of articles share the latter viewpoint (it's a legitimate POV but not taken very seriously academically, as oopposed to newspapers). As I see it, what is spun as a conflict between two POV-pushing groups reflects simply the contrast between scholarship with its rigorous methodologies and an ideological vision of the topic. Yes, I do suffer from something of what the Japanese called a hōgan-biiki (判官贔屓) empathy in my approach to the world. It does influence what attracts my attention, meaning I sympathise with the silenced underdog in so many conflicts, be they Aboriginals or Palestinians or Tibetans. This as far as I am aware does not translate into being uncomfortable with my country of origins, or antisemitic, or hostile to Chinese. From distinct backgrounds, I gather, several editors share this interest and they tend to work well together because they subscribe to the same principles of evidence which are commended in academia as they are on wikipedia as ideals. They are consistently alluded to, for this, as a conspirational anti-Israeli or antisemitic gang, offline and, desultorily, here from time to time. I always ignore the insinuations, as off-topic baiting. What those who suscribe to this viewpoint are doing is taking, generally, their disgruntlement with the Israeli and diaspora scholarship 'we' privilege, and characterizing it as 'anti-jewish/Israeli'. It is, basically, a distaste for the intellectual and moral integrity of scholarship in the Jewish tradition because it doesn't fit easily with the politics of simplification. Now that said, back to something serious. I couldn't care less that a handful of editors here are committed Zionists. They earn one's respect because they don't drag that into the excellent contributions they make but find a common meeting ground here on the necessity for strong scholarly sources and thorough coverage, whatever the cost may be to an 'Israeli' or 'Palestinian' POV. Nishidani (talk) 21:51, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

Have never come across you but I have followed a couple of I/P discussions from afar and this is a very fair summary. Ought to be essay-fied. TrangaBellam (talk) 14:10, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks but it would distract from important things. When A1 machines begin to replace editors and write articles, perhaps one could ask the governing algorithm to write such an essay by exhaustively picking up all cases of I/P sockpuppetry as reported in AE/ANI cases, and yield up the statistical pattern of where that toxic abuse comes from. The editors this offline conspiracy meme refer to, often repeated here, have a bit of their historic record spotted by suspensions and temporal bans, which is to be expected in a 'toxic area' where either pure farce (patiently dealing with an obvious but unproven sock for months of extenuating negotiation over this or that) or Rafferty's rules often ruled the roost (before the 500/30 ARBPIA principle thankfully came into play). I can recall two excellent editors who might be partially defined as 'pro-Palestinian' exploding in a way that earned them the ineludible ban. but this is marginal compared to the huge number of sock and meat puppets with an implicit or otherwise 'pro-Israel' stance (my ideology right or wrong would be a better description) which afflicted the editing area and contributed to its reputation as a POV-toxic area where all should be run out of town. I'm sure they run into several scores. Their only argument was that anyone outside the fold critical of Israel was, ipso facto, antisemitic, hostile to Jews themselves, by definition. That looks incredulously naive, but it it now inscribed in legislation that draws its inspiration from a frankly dictatorial and poplitical attempt to limit free speech by making any reference to that country a matter of tip-toeing through a labyrinthine set of definitions that circumscribe, rope off, render taboo zones in, discourse on these issues. I once noticed something similar underway in Japan, in a genre of policy study discussions, and sponsored by the Nakasone government, to finance a global programme of monitoring everything in the public sphere that mentioned that country, and having an organization capable of picking up the echoes out there immediately, and drawing on prepared spokesmen to rebut anything negative. So it's by no means unique to this other context. The only way such a definition could work would be to set up committees in every city, town and country where whatever one might wish to say would have to pass the scrutiny and earn the imprimature of the relevant Jewish community's representatives on the board. Pure operational lunacy, an outlandishly modern variation of the notorious Index Librorum Prohibitorum. But it has traction, and many people are raised to believe that there is some truth to these endless rumours that antisemitism is endemic, takes a million disguises, and is tacit in all talks of geopolitical or cultural discussion on the Middle East (well, I prefer 'Muddled Yeast').

What was striking in most cases on wikipedia was the adamant refusal to read up on the topic, the ignorance of political history, and, more disturbingly nothing but a brushing word-by-mouth glancing acquaintanceship with the great cultural history of the world they perhaps thought they were defending from an antisemitic 'gang of four'. Even in the present AfD one gets no impression that anyone objecting to it is aware of the fact that in classic Judaism, Maimonides did not think that being a Jew necessarily required one embody that identity in corporeal traits. It was a matter of devoted adherence to, and commitment to, Jewish law.Nishidani (talk) 14:53, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

Notice of Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a report involving you at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement regarding a possible violation of an Arbitration Committee decision. The thread is Nishidani. Thank you. Drsmoo (talk) 02:27, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

The Socratic elenchus is a logical tool. In the Ion, Euthyphro or Gorgias for example, Socrates examines what his respective interlocutors say, eliciting the logical frailties of their opinions. However, anyone could read these exchanges for psychological undercurrents and, by ignoring the logical arguments, claim that Socrates is a bully. Is then Socrates engaged in the pursuit of logical/evidential truth or is he just showing 'aggressive disdain' for his interlocutors? If the latter, then logic and evidence are of no importance, political correctness is paramount.

I used the word ‘stonewalling’. I had in mind Drsmoo's repeating for an entire month, the same opinion, with variations, regardless of considerable efforts to disabuse him of his belief that evidence from researchers amounted to a disparaging attack on both the researchers and Israelis. He made this claim first here, then here, and here (the innuendo is that the very article is antisemitic). See also here, here,here, here, and here.

A full month later, he was still repeating it to Pharos, ignoring every disproof or request for evidence in the interim. Apparently it is I who bludgeons people. I am not Socrates, but was raised to admire the foundations of logic. I have no objections to Tamzim’s proposal, though I think the shared sanction should be motivated, depending on how the respective problematical behaviours imputed to both are interpreted. Nishidani (talk) 04:13, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Honesty compels me to add that, in a post-Freudian world, even someone who might prove to be logically correct, might still harbour morally corrupt intentions. I cannot (re)read the Ion, for instance, without feeling Socrates (Plato rather) is making easy game of a decent fellow. It's called instrumental reason by Adorno and others (the prolific Jon Elster is good on all this).Nishidani (talk) 04:46, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

The nags trot slowly down the cobbled street.

No lash is needed. They've been there before.

The coachman too, liveried up a treat,

Drowses at the reins: this part's a bore.

The passenger in portage shifts a little

To watch, now right, now left, the bustling town,

And bends at times to catch the tat-and-tittle

Of whispering folks who, staring, smile or frown.

Light spruces the way, churchbells tune the air

I've journeyed with zest, worked hard as anyone

And paid my dues, he thinks. The rest is fair.

The festive motley begins to hoot their hallo(w)s.

The tumbril halts, this last stage reached and run.

Ah! More! he chuckles, and steps up to the gallows.

The first two quatrains popped into my mind, somewhat spontaneously, as I took my midday cappuccino in a bar. I walked home and finished the sestet over lunch. But I wondered where the comic hyperbole of the analogy came from. Now I remember, after a nap. In the summer of 1970, at Perugia, I read Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer (1939). There is a passage that must have stuck in my memory to resurface in these lines.

'This day fifty years ago I was born. From solitude in the Womb, we emerge into solitude among our Fellows, and return again to solitude within the Grave. We pass our lives in the attempt to mitigate that solitude. But propinquity is never fusion. The most populous City is but an agglomeration of wildernesses. We exchange Words, but exchange them from prison to prison, and without hope that they will signify to others what they mean to ourselves. . The most intimate contact is only of Surfaces, and we couple, as I have seen the condemned Prisoners at Newgate coupling with their Trulls, between the bars of our cages.' p.174.Nishidani (talk) 16:28, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

R. C. Zaehner

Thank you. Rimbaud is mentioned in the sections Sacred and Profane and Nature Mysticism. Elfelix (talk) 23:15, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

No need to thank me. Zaehner was a very very complex man, as I learnt later. But, since I had had a kind of experience not too dissimilar to what he describes, and I too had been utterly absorbed in reading Rimbaud, that when I came across his book in the late sixties, I read it with passionate interest, and kept my eye out for anything of his that came my way ever after. Cheers and best regards Nishidani (talk) 00:16, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

ARBPIA logged warning

Hi, Nishidani. As a result of a recent AE thread, I am giving you the following logged warning, in my capacity as an uninvoled administrator acting under the contentious topics procedures for the Arab-Israeli conflict:

You are warned for fostering a battleground environment at Zionism, race and genetics and and its talkpage. Further disruption on those pages, including comments on the talkpage that go against the general reminder that has been issued as a result of the same AE thread, may result in a page ban, topic ban, and/or block, at the discretion of any uninvolved administrator, without further warning.

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 16:57, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

:Thanks, Tamzin. A balanced assessment, duly noted. I hope you don't take it amiss if I suggest that 'warned for fostering' would be more precise were it 'warned for having fostered'. Little things like that make me sleepless, not the sanctions themselves- Best regards Nishidani (talk) 19:29, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

I spend a decent portion of my time these days speaking and thinking in a tenseless language, and it's so liberating. In terms of how enwiki sanctions are phrased, though, for whatever reason the standard is to frame the offense in the present tense, even when it's a solitary event, like "is desysopped for deleting the Main Page". I guess we get it from legal contexts, where newspapers tend to write "charged with arson", not "charged with having committed arson". That's a distinction I'll think about in the future. In this case, yes, to be clear, I am referring to your past conduct on the talkpage. Things moved in a positive direction during the AE thread, and I appreciate your having taken on the criticism you received.

Maybe next time I'll just write the warning in said tenseless language... sina utala ike is arguably more accurate than anything I could say in English: sina can be either singular or plural 'you'; utala means both 'argue' and 'battle' (or 'argued', 'battled', 'will argue', or 'will battle'); and ike means 'in a bad way' but also 'in a manner tending against peace'.

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 21:16, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Sorry for wasting your time. Actually I got up from my sickbed (some odd fever that struck today, nothing related to wiki) to strike out my point, what now appears to me to be a lame smartarsed joke. You folks do a marvellous job, reading sedulously through mountains of molehill bickering. I'd have long been committed to an asylum after a week or two had I had to undertake such work. Fin est regards Nishidani (talk) 21:56, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Hoping—non-exclusively and non-demandingly—for a speedy recovery. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 00:11, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

I'd like to point out that this is a potential problem with regard to adhering to this warning. Please be aware of what I said here. I'm just pointing this out, as an expression of concern, but if this kind of thing (coming so soon after the AE discussion was closed!) happens again, I may open a new AE complaint. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:40, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Oh come now, dear fellow, This is extreme overreading. The rulling was neither a gag or muzzle, nor intimidatory. More concentration on the merits of edit suggestions, and less on fine reading between the lines to tease out a possible tripwire clues for further arbitration, please. Nishidani (talk) 19:05, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Too bad that this was your response. I had wanted to just let you know about it, and had hoped that you would take it seriously. But consider yourself notified: WP:AE, again. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:49, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Just want to call your attention to...

...WP:Close paraphrasing, which I'm certain you are aware of. Best, Beyond My Ken (talk) 00:05, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Immaterial now. I saw this coming a month ago. That's the whole point of my verses above from 12 August ('The nags trot slowly down the cobbled street' etc). So I didn't walk into it. To the contrary, I took every precaution to exercise even more care than is normal around here. Not enough, and since the conditions set make it impossible to work in the way I always do, well, 17 years and about 1,000 articles is a fair record as a volunteer. I hate to admit it, but at a certain age, egoism reasserts its rights, and it's time I enjoyed myself (I hate that reflexive) by reading up on things I am really passionate about( rather than the dull grind of boring topics), and by travelling (France, and Australia first) It will be entertaining to see the last article I wrote gutted. No regrets. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 02:47, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

This is terrible

Hi, Nishidani. This is terrible. I couldn't sleep, so I went look at WP:AE, made a tiny change here, and, without reading the new section "Nishidani 2" to the end, thought "Tomorrow, I absolutely must comment", and fell asleep again. But on getting up just now, I find the section already closed, less than nine hours after it was opened. (Was it impossible to allow editors, including uninvolved admins, in different timezones a chance to comment, Callanecc? Not that anything from me would surely have made any difference, when the very fair comments by Iskandar2, Selfstudier, Firefangledfeathers, and Zero0000 did not.) I'm shocked first of all at Tryptofish requesting a pound of flesh ("Nishidani's reply to my message ... strikes me as defiant" — ooh, can't have that). Surely Tryptofish didn't use to be so.. I can't think of the right word.. to act like that? Perhaps that's just the rose-tinted glasses of my memory. And I'm also shocked that Tamzin followed it up with a humiliating sanction. You have been treated outrageously, in my opinion, and I understand your reaction 100%. I can't in conscience try to persuade you to stay — only wish you the best of luck. If you're really gone (people have been known to change their minds when the wiki-addiction strikes, and that's no shame either) I'll miss you so much. Bishonen | tålk 08:24, 20 August 2023 (UTC).

I noticed this just per the edit summary, and have no time to look into it right now, but will miss you, too, if this is final. (I decided eleven years ago that I wouldn't leave, pleasing those who would want it.) Best wishes, and remember you are precious. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:32, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

1; 2;34;5) On second though that personal tweak of B's note above might appear to attribute to her diffs I drew up when reported, but withheld from using in my own defense, which I improperly used to gloss her kind remarks of perplexity. My apologies. Perhaps you might consider locking this page down, Bish, to avoid prolonging this silly business and ugly recriminations.Nishidani (talk) 11:37, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

But.. but.. there aren't any ugly recriminations, only commiseration so far, and people are likely to want to add more when America wakes up. How about I close it down if/when there's something ugly? Bishonen | tålk 11:54, 20 August 2023 (UTC).

Unlike me, you actually understand how wikipedia works. I defer. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 12:02, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Dude, its one page for two weeks, wtf cares. Im trying to get Israeli occupation of the West Bank to GA so we can get that DYK that was withheld for bullshit reasons way back when, and the reviewer has given some solid feedback so far imo. You gonna quit over a two week ban on some page that nobody is ever going to even read besides the people bickering over it? Cmon, stop being silly, still lots of work to do on things that are worth your time. nableezy - 20:00, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

I've been there before, in the good old days when one was reported mostly unsuccessfully by an assortment of sockpuppets and militant POV-pushers to AE two or three times every year. One mark like that on your log, and it sticks: that's what the admin sees when a new complaint is opened. Just on one article (and it is now a very good one) we've had two crowded, ridiculous AfDs in a mere week, denying even what an acute legal analyst like Levivich, with whom I have had a conflicted relationship, admitted with integrity from the outset, when he stated, that the topic was legitimate, a serious focus of notable scholarship (even while honestly disagreeing with my handling of it). That didn't work? Stonewalling, and then 2 AE complaints within a few days. If that doesn't mean after two weeks that I'd be forced every time I edit to look over my shoulder, rather than read the sources, I'll be a monkey's uncle.

I reread Auden's New Year Letter today. I recommend it strongly. It really does bring home that working in here under impossible conditions is masochistic. No prima donna act (quick exit hoping for a recall) I've lots of work to do that have a better readership, i.e. myself:) Cheers, Nab. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 20:14, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

No, it does not stick lol. Nobody will give a half a shit about Nishidani being page banned for two weeks for being mildly petulant in about three weeks time. Yes, some person might in seven years time say hey this is a recurring pattern, eg like so, but that will generally be taken as sour grapes and ignored. You disagree with the sanction? Appeal it. You dont care enough to do that? Then ignore that page for two weeks. But this is a among the most pointless things Ive seen on this website, and we both know how high that bar is. For a fucking article with 38 watchers and probably a hundred non-involved page views. nableezy - 02:49, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

• I wrote a long paragraph, but when I stripped out all the stuff that sounded trite, or angry, or patronizing, or something that would cause someone to issue me a Contentious Topic Alert^(R), all I'm left with is this: I'll miss your way with words, I'll miss your honesty, and we probably didn't deserve having you here for as long as we did. --Floquenbeam (talk) 00:04, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

  What Floq said, I can't improve on that. Nice to see what I viewed as a travesty of justice fixed and that Tamzin finally listened, with a very nice response below in her removal of the ban. I hope you will come back at least from time to time; I'll always remain in your debt for rescuing my draft of the article on Michael Astour Doug Weller talk 07:27, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Notice that you are now subject to an arbitration enforcement sanction

The following sanction now applies to you:

You are page-banned from Zionism, race and genetics and its talkpage for 2 weeks from this timestamp.

You have been sanctioned for continued temperature-raising conduct surrounding the article after the warning above. As I've said at AE, this wasn't a massive violation, but it wasn't nothing. And if I don't enforce a warning like I gave above, there's no point in giving warnings. So, correspondingly, I have given a sanction that isn't nothing but isn't massive. It is my hope that after 2 weeks you can either return to the article on better footing, or make the tough call we all have to sometimes, and move on to a different article.

Notes: I have not pageblocked you from the two pages, but if you would prefer to be pageblocked, please let me now. Also note that a page ban does not strictly prohibit you from discussing the article elsewhere, but, informally, I would discourage doing so.

This sanction is imposed in my capacity as an uninvolved administrator under the authority of the Arbitration Committee's decision at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Index/Palestine-Israel articles#Final decision and, if applicable, the contentious topics procedure. This sanction has been recorded in the log of sanctions. If the sanction includes a ban, please read the banning policy to ensure you understand what this means. If you do not comply with this sanction, you may be blocked for an extended period, by way of enforcement of this sanction—and you may also be made subject to further sanctions.

You may appeal this sanction using the process described here. I recommend that you use the arbitration enforcement appeals template if you wish to submit an appeal to the arbitration enforcement noticeboard. You may also appeal directly to me (on my talk page), before or instead of appealing to the noticeboard. Even if you appeal this sanction, you remain bound by it until you are notified by an uninvolved administrator that the appeal has been successful. You are also free to contact me on my talk page if anything of the above is unclear to you.  -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 21:00, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

No. I never appeal such things. Technically, this just means I should never edit wikipedia again, because my prose style, in its occasional use of an exclamatory, is unacceptable, and that I must work under a sword of Damocles, in the twitching hands of any editor in a contentious area to definitely resolve their disagreements with me over what are merely technical issues of (a) thorough familiarity with the topic (b) cogent analysis of sources. So be it. Bye (and of course, best personal wishes). Nishidani (talk) 21:05, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Don't know whether you should appeal or not, but I think it's too harsh a sanction personally. I can imagine myself making a similarly worded comment and not know who added the original content (and not check either, as I agree it doesn't matter). I would think such a comment is really aimed to be about the content, and not about who wrote it. (Indeed, I would personally make the same comment about the text preceding TF's edit, Late 19th century science affirmed the idea that humanity was divided into a hierarchy of races.) Tamzin I'd request reconsidering? I really don't think this is an infraction or raising the temperature of the page, or intended to. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 21:55, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

@ProcrastinatingReader, I might be missing something obvious, but it looks to me like the text Late 19th century science affirmed the idea that humanity was divided into a hierarchy of races was added by Nishidani here and here. – bradv 23:18, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Nishidani put "Late 19th century science affirmed the idea that humanity was divided into a hierarchy of races"

and TP edited it to read "Beginning in the late 19th century, science provided evidence for the idea that humanity was divided into genetically distinct races" and then Nishidani quite properly queried on the talk page, the italicized phrases. Selfstudier (talk) 23:39, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Aren't both of those italicized phrases better than the words they replaced? Science regularly evaluates evidence both for and against something, but the word "affirms" implies something was proven. And "genetically distinct", while still probably not the best wording (or even an accurate statement), is less wrong than claiming a "hierarchy" of races exists. – bradv 23:45, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

No. To affirm is to "declare, state, assert, aver, proclaim, pronounce" and so on, according to a handy thesauraus. The subject of the sentence is "Late 19th century science" (not just science but late 19th century science, because "late 19th century" modifies science); the verb is "affirm" (or plug in a synonym from the list above), which is correct. It doesn't mean that which has been "affirmed" has been proven or that evidence has been supplied - it means that 19th century science stated/proclaimed/asserted/affirmed an idea, which we in the 21st century know to be incorrect. Nish's sentence is better than the correction and it's important to understand the distinction since we deal with words, grammar, writing on this site. Furthermore, any writer knows that the first attempt is always only a draft that will be rewritten ad nauseam until perfect - well, a person such as myself has to work to get it right, but a writer with Nish's facility with language may well get a good rendition more quickly. Apologies for butting in, but have seen this on my watchlist and aside from being upset at seeing the loss of an excellent editor, am upset that the language is misunderstood. I won't get into a back-in-forth. Victoria (tk) 02:14, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Victoria is perfectly correct. In fact the only real problem with Nish's use of "affirm" is that some fraction of readers won't know what it means. As Brad's comment illustrates. Zero^talk 02:30, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

If this is the way that the text was intended, then I indeed misread it, and I suspect others did too. In fact, this whole dispute can likely be attributed to a genuine misunderstanding of these two competing lede sentences. I don't know where this needs to go from here, but I do think it would have been helpful to get to the bottom of this before the AE thread was closed. (cc: Callanecc, Tamzin) – bradv 03:23, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Victoria. @Bradv. I didn't follow this section of my talk page. My bible is the OED 1989 edition. I read it every day. It gives some obsolete uses, then provides the basic formal definition:

To make a statement and stand by it, to maintain or assert strongly, to declare or state positively, to aver.' vol.1 p.218 column 2.

As to the rest, simply check in google books: (a)'science+19th century+hierarchy of races'. (b) 'affirmed+19th century+hierarchy of races.' It's never a question of 'evidence'. But this is now history. Nishidani (talk) 20:00, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

I'll just reiterate what I've said on my talk, which is that I didn't close the AE thread, don't object to a reopen, and don't object to reversing this sanction if a reopened thread finds rough consensus against it. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 03:27, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Actually, sorry, that's kind of a cop-out. Callan closed the thread on the premise that my sanction settled the matter. If I'm open to further discussion, then I should be the one to reopen it. So I have. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 03:43, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Pageban vacated

Hi, Nishidani. Per comments at AE from admins who know what they're doing better than I do, I've vacated your pageban. (Intentional word choice—vacatur, not reversal.)

You've been quite courteous about this and not asked for any retraction let alone apology, but nonetheless, I'm sorry that I came down too hard here. I tend to break my admin work into "tours of duty", the endpoints of which I define based on what Coren said when he unblocked me: don't delve too deeply and quickly in the back-office aspects of the project – it's rather seedy back there and you'll end up with a jaundiced view, and when I find myself reaching for admin tools before most of my colleagues, that's my jaundice alarm, time to seek out some friendlier sky.

So, I'm going to get back to work on a silly article about Marines eating crayons. That seems like a more pleasant use of my time than trying to create peace in the Middle East one AE sanction at a time. (That is said with commiseration and respect for the denizens of that topic area, not as criticism of anyone.) Maybe write a few more GAs, remind myself why I do this before I return to these seedy back areas.

As I said before, I'll stop short of asking you to come back, because I never want to talk someone back into a situation they feel is bad for them... But I'll put it this way: I hope the day comes, be it tomorrow or a long time from now, where editing Wikipedia is something you feel is good for you. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 05:27, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

How courteous and decent. No, dear young lady, you stay in there. Don't feel admonished. I actually owe you. I stopped smoking, the stimulating narcotic (oxymoron) that gets me through the strainful patches of wiki editing, once I absorbed your original decision. The community restored to me an option, that I may or may not exercise, but expressions of goodwill rightly put my pride in its place.

As above, I read Auden, and the following lines spoke to me, and no one else, though they apply to us all, in the civil community of wiki.

Our news is seldom good: the heart.
As Zola said, must always start
The day by swallowing its toad
Of failure and disgust. Our road
Gets worse and we seem altogether
Lost as our theories, like the weather,
Veer round completely every day,
And all that we can always say
Is: true democracy begins
With free confession of our sins.
In this alone are all the same,
All are so weak that none dare claim
“I have the right to govern,” or
"Behold in me the Moral Law,”
And all real unity commences
In consciousness of differences.
That all have needs to satisfy
And each a power to supply.
We need to love all since we are
Each a unique particular
That is no giant, god, or dwarf.
But one odd human isomorph;
We can love each because we know
All, all of us, that this is so:
Can live because we’ve lived, the powers
That we create with are not ours. 1625-1650

Instruct us in the civil art
Of making from the muddled heart
A desert and a city where
The thoughts that have to labour there
May find locality and peace.
And pent-up feelings their release.
Send strength sufficient for our day,
And point our knowledge on its way,
O da quod jubes, Domine. 1676-1684 Nishidani (talk) 10:14, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

(Stray thought: In high school I had the honor of sleeping through a lecture by Auden's friend Richard Howard, and, once I'd woken up, getting to see a second lecture in which he, in his 80s, utterly scandalized a stodgy New England faculty by reciting poetry about homosexuality. I see Howard died last year... Wonder how hard it would be to get his article to GA... But for now I'll stick to writing about crayons.)

[M]ust always start / The day by swallowing its toad / Of failure and disgust was an interesting line to wake up to. I do find it true many mornings, nagging thoughts of all the things that are wrong in my world and the world. And then I go talk to my partner and seek out the other things that ground me (remembering my own essay—primarily about mental illness, but also relevant in any discussion of healthy mentalities for editing and for life).

I'll answer, partly, with Yeats' "Politics":

And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.

An older classmate selected that poem for me in 8th grade as representative of my nature—knowing my Irish heritage, but not the familial lore that it was Yeats' lover Maud Gonne who recruited my great-grandfather into the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The poem's been more applicable to my life than I might have expected (gendered language aside). At that age I expected I'd be ruling the world someday. Instead my life's taken a path of making a big difference for a few people, and a small difference for a lot of people, and I'm happy with that. Happy to not always be focused "On Roman or on Russian / Or on Spanish politics".

All that is to say, I'm not going anywhere. And I hope you aren't either. Let me know if anything on this list ever catches your eye. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 13:57, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Poetry! Boy (oops sorry, my residual genderunmindedness), could we, had one just 'world enough and time,' riff on that!

Of course, those poignantly melancholic lines, ‘But O that I were young again/ And held her in my arms!” were a late case of Yeats alluding to what he wrote 10 years earlier.

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

As for Auden, I’ve never read his poems as gendered. Some time back, discussing films with my sister who was visiting, she asked me if I could recall the poem used in the funeral oration of the film, Four Weddings and a Funeral. So I recited Stop all the clocks for her, but couldn’t help running on with a follow-up of the equally overpoweringly poignant Lullaby, as if they were one poem. It is utterly immaterial who the beloved and the griever may be genderwise. Those speak to everyone, across all socially-constructed lines.

My first fiancée was a woman who sought me out after several years of a lesbian relationship. –she’d been attracted to me at high school as the really odd person out in a class of drop-outs or misfits - My lifelong best mate (other than my wife and two siblings) was a male homosexual, diagnosed as a schizophrenic, who married and proved himself to be a magnificent father and fine husband. I’ve never had the slightest personal interest in these gender, clinical, political or ethnic discriminations that infest and vex humanity, as opposed to attentively studying the intellectual genealogies of these cognitive biases in our world and the way they inflect our social perceptions.

A final anecdote to complement/compliment your's. I was walking home at midday today, and saw an unusual (for here) species of white butterfly flying backwards down the steep path that leads to my place. I figured out that, caught in a greenless, shadeless tract under a broiling sun, it had worked out an ingenious strategy of lifting off with a slight flutter and carefully slowing its wing beat so that the very warm current of air it would only have exhausted itself in flying against, bore it gently backwards, about 10 paces each time. It kept landing on the scalding metal lids of manholes, by freakish chance, instead of the cooler pebbled roadway, and would again lift off and repeat the same gliding manoeuvre. I thought of catching it to place it in shade, but it was headed or rather bum-firstwise drifting, into a pleasant grove, and, indeed, finally settled there.

I went to bed for my afternoon oneiromancy nap, which takes 25-30 minutes and gives me dream material. In this, I was walking hand in hand with my wife down to a jewellery store but we were stopped by the side of a church called St.Lucy’s (I recently had retinal problems) by a friar (my wife was a devout lay Franciscan) who look distressed, saying their nativity crib was being wrecked. I left them, went inside, and found a bevy of women frantically milling around a straw-strewn corner, the crib. A bulldog squatted there, muzzling what was underneath, a writhing mess of half-eaten worms. (Neighbours here often call on me to remove snakes, toads, the afterbirth of litters of pups, and other slimy things from their properties because ‘the Australian’ reputedly grew up coping with filthy slithering creatures and appears to like them). I shooed the bulldog off, cleaned the mess and managed to save several of the surviving and largish worms, clean them, and set them aside in safety. Then, remembering my wife, I walked out, past a long line of local people, all familiar faces, who however didn’t recognize me, but were intent on visiting the now restored crib that was the renewed object of popular curiosity. My wife was no longer there. I woke. If one approaches this carefully, it, with the butterfly prompt ((ψυχή.'life, soul, intellect, ghost, butterfly/moth') that immediately preceded it, summarizes aspectually my whole life, and, at the same time, aspects of this recent incident, portrait and cameo inset in dialogue, the general and particular. It's not exhaustive. Dreams never are. Perspectives are infinite.

This little vignette to replace a poem that refuses to rhyme, in thanks for the very interesting anecdote you shared with ‘this tattered coat upon a stick’ busying himself until he is gathered into ‘the artifice of eternity.‘ Finest regards Nishidani (talk) 16:37, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Your dream reminded me of an anecdote I mentioned in my RfA debrief: As the sun set, the rising tide brought in six horseshoe crabs. A wave would push them up the beach, over a berm near the low-tide mark, and they would slowly right themselves and stagger back toward the water, just in time for the next wave to push them back. A few hours after I read your comment, my metamour and I went for a nice walk on the beach, where we encountered a single horseshoe crab caught on its back. It was in direct moonlight on an otherise unlit beach, so we lost night vision momentarily as we looked at it, and at first thought it was dead. But I prodded it and could just make out its legs moving. She and I righted it together, and last I saw it was fighting its way back to sea.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether to read anything into that, but I thought I would share. (P.S., wasn't meaning to call Auden's work gendered, but rather referencing the "girl standing there" in "Politics". P.P.S., speaking of which.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 02:52, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

What a nice way to wake up to a new day, with a wonderful new word. Proof if any of the dictum in Goethe's Faust (lines 1334-1336, a sanction = bad, leads to a good, by this early positive statement of the law of unintended effects). Metamour. Beautiful.

I just had a look at the wiki page on Yeats' Politics, There's a dating error. The 24th May as date of composition is wrong. The manuscript note with that date states that it was composed the day before, 23rd. Then there's that supposed quote from Thomas Mann. That should be attributed 'according to Archibald McLeish' because that's where Yeats pulled it from, unless there's a source which specifically identifies the passage in Thomas Mann where he states what he is quoted for. That I know this is pure coincidence, because 45 years ago , I read T Reed's book, Thomas Mann:The Uses of Tradition, (1974) where I picked up a remark by Mann which is close to the one cited here from McLeish, but different- I.e. In jeder geistigen Haltung ist das Politische latent (The political is latent in every 'cultural' outlook.) I later checked it up and tracked it down to Mann's 1929 essay, Die Stellung Freuds in der modernen Geistesgeschichte ,(Freud's Position in the History of Modern Culture). My guess, it's nothing more than that, is that McLeish would have rephrased this from the passage in the Faber & Faber version of that essay which came out in 1933. It would be nice to chase this all down, but pointless because it would not be able to be used on wiki (like thousands of things one notes in reading) per WP:OR. You're safe, in any case, with the companionship of poetry throughout life. Politics by definition, as the art of lying in prose, can never be poetry. Poetry can be read politically, only by excluding every other level of address, intimation, lilt and resonance and reducing the symphony where all the players have left the stage, leaving only the chap with a broken violin scratching away to a tone-deaf audience. Well, I'm turning over a new leaf, (to see if it's got rust on the underside), i.e. just taking indefinite time out to write up a few things without the tedious, but ineludible, constraint of seeking for some 'authority' on the subject to back up my own inferences. There's a remarkable amount of things one notes about great poems that appear not to be noticed by the critical tradition. That was the hardest thing about editing here, though I have always accepted it as absolutely necessary to provide the readership with an ironcast guarantee that what they read is authoritatively sourced, neutral and verifiable. Best wishes, wiki and worldwise. Nishidani (talk) 07:54, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Should I, shouldn't I

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Genetic_studies_on_Jews#POV_tag We are citing you here. Of course, you may pay no attention:) Selfstudier (talk) 14:59, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Glad to see you around

I've been checking your contribs intermittently, and today was happy to see some recent edits. Won't ask you if you're back, but anything is good. Meanwhile, I suppose you've gotten your wish regarding my own activity levels. Avoiding admin areas has proven easier said than done, this time around. Still, less of the noisy stuff, bit more content work. If there were an option to be desysopped for 2 weeks out of every 3 months, I'd take it. (I guess I could just ask for that, but sooner or later I might get pocket-vetoed on the resysop request.) Anyways, just thought I'd say hi and happy editing, to whatever extent you plan to edit. :) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 20:20, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Not back. Too hectic a schedule offline. Just tidying up. I'll write a decent reply tomorrow. Best regards.Nishidani (talk) 20:30, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Did that special diff suggest to you I wished something about your own activity levels? 'Boh!' as the Italians say (i.e. 'I dunno'.)

I finally had the check-up last Monday. Surprisingly, I read the Snellen chart from top to bottom without a hitch. The optometrist was somewhat disconcerted at this, and I think, might have suspected I'd taken a tip from Donald Sutherland in Space Cowboys by memorizing the charts beforehand. So he poked at the smallest print randomly, and asked me to identify the letters. Which I did, except for a slight pause between a 'c' and'o', quickly corrected. He shook his head. Highly abnormal at my age. So he set me up before the slit lamp and examined both eyes for 10 minutes. Nothing that 2 carrots a day for two months wouldn't fix, just a comprehensible fatigue from doing that wiki article at speed. By the way, to increase the absorption of vitamin A, the tip is to lightly smear the carrot in olive oil before consumption. It increases the capacity to absorb more of it than otherwise. So here I am, speaking Japanese to myself with a bugsbunny accent as I give the meat pies a vacation.Nishidani (talk) 20:12, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Well, "stay in there". Maybe extrapolating too far from there, but I appreciated the sentiment regardless.

And your eyesight's certainly better than mine, then. You can roughly work out how bad my vision is by looking at the refraction on my right cheek in File:Jew Trans Soul Rebel.jpg. Y'know, tattoos make for a much nicer topic area than politics and war. Been doing some work on Cover-up tattoo, but got sidetracked by dragging myself into an ArbCom case. But I have a friend who's getting a self-harm cover-up soon, and might talk them into a freely-licensed picture of it—except it's complicated, because strictly the tattoo itself ought to also be freely licensed, which probably I could get away with not doing (cf. c:Category:Tattoos), but having written Mike Tyson's tattoos I can't exactly claim ignorance of the law (or the academics'-best-guess-of-what-the-law-is). All a tangent, but, glad to hear of your health. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 22:14, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Thinking recently about the immense complications that can arise from simple issues on that page, the line Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto kept cropping up, as I tried to think how editors who repeatedly disagreed with me thought. When I read Crime and Punishment, as a mental exercise I tried to apply it to imagining what it must have been like to be Rashkolnikov, applying the Terentian dictum to the situation ('could I find myself in a position of murdering someone?'). It's become ever since somewhat of a habit. So when you mentioned tattoes, I wondered about getting one myself. I never have even considered the idea, perhaps because of a native prejudice against social statements, be they in clothes, haircuts, or anything else connected with one's body. I try to be a minimalist, lifewise. But my wife wanted to be tattoed. She never could as long as she was a teacher, for a scruple that a nice butterfly tattoo on her arm would influence her impressionable 5-10 age students, for whom she had but one aim - teach them to master with great precision the rules of grammar and composition (several who went on to graduate at tertiary level have since told me they never needed to study grammar at the later middle or high school levels). By the time she retired and started to reconsider the idea, she was diagnosed with cancer, and so this project was forgotten. Your remarks have brought me round to considering that I might complete her desire by getting the tattoo she missed, and for that unintended prompt I am very grateful. I'll book-mark your tattoo pages to keep me up to date.

'Stay in there', i.e. 'hang in there to your administrative function. Even when subjected to sanctions I thought inexplicable, I've never impugned administrators: it is an exasperatingly hard volunteer vocation, with few rewards, and they are as rare as hen's teeth, rarer even that our lonely content editors. Most talk page argufying illustrates a general lack of experience of how articles are written, rather than bits and pieces tweaked. There's a sociological reason for this: most editors don't have the time to read widely the literature on any one topic, page by page, and, most recently, social media tend to re-engineer minds to a very short attention span, while militating against the kind of detachment and curiosity that comes with focused study of any subject-matter. So I just suggested that the exercise of article composition gives one a kind of rare training that is of equal value to the project.

As to eyesight, like my father I was an early bookworm: I didn't formally study much at school, which was only useful because it had several sports on the curriculum which I loved to play. Worrying that, like him, I would end up needing spectacles in my 20s, he gave me a book and a set of rules and exercises to avoid the worst. Never read for more than 40 minutes consecutively. That is the natural limit for concentration's absorptive powers, which return after a short relaxed break. Take frequent 10 minute breaks - go out, kick a footy, climb a tree, throw a cricket ball a few overs at a wicket, whatever. Secondly, immediately on breaking off, roll the eyes for 30 seconds, and rapidly alternating focus from the nose to a distant object several times, etc.etc. I was the only one of three reading siblings to do this, and the only one not to require glasses. It's not genetic, then, but just mechanical. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 12:26, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Funny, I got my first tattoo—the litany against fear in 16-point Courier—while working at a middle school. A few friends asked if it would be an issue to have that on my forearm, and I explained that I was still one of the least tattooed people who worked there. How times (and cultures) change. Getting my third tattoo in an hour and a half, actually! A khamsa on my back, because if there's one thing Wikipedia's convinced me of, it's the existence of the ayin hara.

I do agree (generally, not necessarily about the specific case you have in mind) that everyone ought to try writing a (non-cookie-cutter) article before sitting in judgment of other ones. And even with that experience, ought to familiarize themselves with the strengths and weaknesses of the sources cited in an article, and of those not cited, before demanding radical change. I come at this from the perspective of being a rare RfA pass at 0 GAs, and having since written a few of those. Someone said to me at RfA or around that time that the main issue with admins who don't do much content is that they don't have a sense of how it feels to have written an article and see it come (as it feels subjectively) under attack. I do get that feeling now, and it definitely helps me be a better admin. But not always perfectly (as you've seen firsthand).

Anyways, off to get stabbed a few thousand times by someone I barely know.^{[worrywarts, please click link]} I'll refrain from comparing or contrasting several hours of sharp pain along my spine to any things I could be doing on-wiki. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 16:03, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Glad

September songs

my story today

what Tamzin said -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:29, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Today I remember Raymond Arritt, who still helps me, five years after he died, per what he said in my darkest time on Wikipedia (placed in my edit-notice as a reminder), and by teh rulez. - Latest pics from a weekend in Berlin (one more day to come). --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:57, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

The Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō once complained that autumn in Berlin was lonely for the Japanese because you couldn’t hear the sound of cicadas! When I read that, I wondered how the Berlin street Zikadenweg got its name. One of the pleasures of walking home at night in autumn is to tune in to their chirring, from corner to corner. Best wishes Nishidani (talk) 20:35, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

For your lib

Jews and Science Selfstudier (talk) 18:45, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks indeed, Self. As always your tip-offs on RS I've missed are spot on. Keep me tuned. In my retirement, I'm going to look into this line of material even more closely than the haste of quick research allowed. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 21:52, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Verily, the Jews doth prove most fascinating, warranting a lifelong dedication to research. Infinity Knight (talk) 21:44, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Look up solecism. 'Jews', like any other plural subject, cannot take the archaic third person singular (doth). Nishidani (talk) 22:17, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

In the scrolls, thou shalt happen upon many instances of "the Jews doth" therefore I am not particularly enamored with the notion of solecism. I do tend to incline toward a descriptive approach in the field of linguistics. I find prescriptive stance somewhat archaic. The tongue is employed as it is, not as dictated by tomes of grammar. Infinity Knight (talk) 22:41, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

As your Kierkegaardian monicker suggests, you should resign yourself to not trying to fudge up some semi-literate sub-Chatter-toned squib of pseudo-archaic prose, attributed to non-existent 'scrolls', commingled with give-away and, to my eye, ugly, 'Americanisms' like 'enamored with'. Noah Webster was justly enamoured of a new 'people's language', but would have dismissed sophomoric attempts to spout in an hi-falutin’ style, as is the crass case here, as another of the 'odious distinctions of provincial' idiolects instanced in the above. It is particularly tin-eared (in the sense of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) to evoke the Bloomfieldian prescriptive/descriptive dyad to justify your blooper. The effect is comical - feigning to disabuse your prose sketch of warranted imputations of 'archaisms' while, precisely, mugging up a 'thumbled' piece of imitative archaicism. You're weigh(ed) out of your depth, full fathom five in the genre of sunken sub-Icarean flights of fancy, even if the 'tongue' you speak of is that of the flippancy of a vagrant 'tongue in cheek'. Now, as agreed long ago, don't harass this page with your dabblings, that's a good chap. You might find 'prescriptive stance' to be acceptable, but in English, American or otherwise, it requires the introductory definite or indefinite article. And 'tomes of grammar' in any man's language is, colloquially, 'grammatical tomes'. Further otiose adlibbings here will be automatically reverted, unread.Nishidani (talk) 03:27, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

Condolences

I saw your comment about your Israeli friend('s friend). I'm very sorry about their ordeal. What happened was cruel and unjust.VR _talk 00:11, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

thought you should see this

Page views on a very well written article. nableezy - 20:39, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Cripes. Well, I'll be a monkey's nuncle! And there I was, thinking with the snarky prejudices of huffy old age that 35,000 was way beyong the probable limit of the literate in Western societies. Go figure.Thanks, pal.Nishidani (talk) 21:39, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi Nishidani

Hi Nishidani, in the last 24hrs, you have once again started a thread attacking individual editors on the talk page. I invite you to strike some of those messages, before I pursue them at AE. Andre🚐 00:32, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi Nishidani, as I haven't heard from you, I wanted to let you know that I'm notifying you that I'm going to report your recent comments to AE. Andre🚐 04:33, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

That's interesting. As anyone should know reading my work, I am on European time. I mentioned above I am in Normandy. So you inform this page well after the witching hour of midnight when all good people sleep that I should erase a comment, and wait two hours. Then, is it that one is unable to bear the suspense of a natural silence?, you tell me you have reported me at AE 'because I haven't heard from you'. The nth example of disattentiveness.

Do you really think that the demand on our time made by you and Tryptofish for three months to ask us to keep discussing, and rediscussing ad nauseam a peculiar discontent you share with three words strung together on just one wiki article must now extend its fingers even into the drowsy nooks of our nocturnal, otherwise well-merited repose from this ongoing serial nightmare of WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT behaviour? Nishidani (talk) 08:08, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

I make no demand on time, I ask only civility. You are not obligated to reply or respond. That's WP:OWN. Andre🚐 16:43, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

on the other hand

while singing this one should mull over some great opportunities to improve one's investment portfolio. A lot of great prime Mediterranean beachfront properties will perhaps be shortly on the market. Nishidani (talk) 18:02, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Notice of Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a report involving you at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement regarding a possible violation of an Arbitration Committee decision. The thread is Nishidani. Thank you. Andre🚐 04:37, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

The original AfD discussion took place here. I'll cite just two comments (not addressed to you)

• (1)I'll say it again: anyone who claims this topic is not the subject of scholarly study is lying. There isn't a "good faith" explanation. It's not a content dispute. Just concede that this is a topic of scholarly study. If you want to argue some other reason for deletion -- POVFORK, TNT, whatever -- go ahead, but don't misrepresent the sources by suggesting they are not about Zionism, race, and genetics, as a single cohesive topic, discussed by many academic sources, for decades. 13 July 2023
• (2)Scroll up and read. And in the future, don't vote in an AfD when you haven't read any of the sources, you're wasting everyone else's time. Scanning the titles in the article isn't good enough (though it seems you missed the titles that mention Zionist eugenics and Zionists and the genomic Jew...). Hot takes aren't helpful at AFD. 14 July 2023 see also here

On the article talk page, many of these following are in response to your remarks:

• (3)I literally just quoted a source that covers Zionism, race, genetics, and Palestinians in the same paragraph. How are you saying "and not Palestinians" when the quote is right here? Have you actually opened any of the sources I just listed to see if they cover Zionism, race, genetics, and Palestinians? If not, please do so before making any more comments here. 28 September 2023
• (4)(If this sounds familiar it's because I literally just copied and pasted my previous comments from earlier discussions.) . Students who don't do the reading shouldn't try to participate in the class discussion. Same for editors who haven't read any of the sources. 20 October 2023
• (5)For the umpteenth time, these books are, indeed, about (1) Zionism, (2) race, and (3) genetics, including (3a) molecular genetics. 20 October 2023
• (6)You continue make these misrepresentations of the sources, and I keep posting quotes debunking those misrepresentations. I really, really think it's time for you to stop talking about sources you very obviously have not read. 21 October 2023
• (7)There is no substitute for reading the sources. No shortcuts. Reading the Wikipedia articles about the authors is not enough, you have to read the literature in the field. If you skip the research and comment about things which you do not know about, you waste everyone else's time.20 October 2023

That is just the briefest list of irritations expressed over an exhausting three month period of pointless hairsplitting and errant argufying by another, indisputably neutral editor, whose palmary acuity in cutting to the chase and summarizing complex talk page or arbitration disputes is universally acknowledged. I call it, less urbanely, evidence of incompetence, and stand by that. Nishidani (talk) 15:16, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Noted that you have no remorse or concern for your civility issues. Andre🚐 16:44, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Note that you have completely missed or ignored the gravamen of those quotations. I.e. you are the third person in as many months who has trawled through the minutiae of my generally polite replies to find some leg-in for an AE ban on my presence on wikipedia, while more capable wikipedians than I have been equally severe in protesting the game of attrition in those threads.

Remorse, for what? Some ayenbite of inwyt for exercising over three months an extraordinary patience in observing, and often responding to, courteously, at extenuating length a huge number of weirdly distracted, unfocused opinions about a topic from many editors who, from the outset, appear not to have the slightest interest in actually reading either the article or its 3,000 pages of incisive scholarly texts, while insisting of voicing their impressionistic viewpoints.

Were I to get into the question of the moral evaluation of language used, I imagine I would find myself writing some untractably lengthy and boring psychoanalytic screed on how much of what has been written has everything to do with implied attitudes there and almost nothing to do with the actual content of the article or topic. I would start with Oh, you suffer so!, an exemplary instance of Schadenfreude thrown my way after I expressed frustration at the waste of time caused by thoughtless and repetitive argufying, a sardonic sneer at the perceived pain a sensitive reader of language might imaginably feel when exposed to consistent nonsense. Were I perturbed by such attitudes, so prevalent in careless writing, I wouldn't have lasted 17 years on wikipedia.

I am reminded by your peculiar choice of the word remorse to recall what Stephen Dedalus thought of Haines in Ulysses. He thought the Englishman's demure reserve and patient niceness must disguise feelings of guilt arising from a suffered awareness of what his country had wrought on Ireland for several hundred years.Nishidani (talk) 17:53, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Nishidani, it's incredibly hard to read and respond to you. I appreciate literary allusions as much (probably quite a bit more) than the next guy, but, your whole 4 paragraphs which could have been a simple "OK, you're right, I'm getting a little overwrought, and I'll rein it in"; no, instead, the only diff in your message is one to @Tryptofish, as though, because we're on the "same team" in this dispute, anything he says is an insult from me to you. Is that what you think? Andre🚐 18:11, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

What gave you the impression I am, or was, 'overwrought'? Those who know me personally recognize that were my house to fall down, or some disaster hit, I would seem imperturbable. Simply because, when anything negative happens, my reflex is to stand aside and think what is the most rational thing to do, and certainly not panic. I was told to learn to do this as a child.

There is an idiom in Italian: lanciare un sasso e poi ritirare la mano. 'Throw a stone and then withdraw the hand'. It describes behaviour that causes a ripple among people, while the person responsible for the ensuing mayhem stands aside and watches, amused, the confusion their unobserved action caused. It means, concretely, that in instances of social upset or conflict, all cause and effect is forgotten or not noted, but one simply copes with the uproar, whatever the cause. Much conversation is like that. I'm afraid I must dial up a film on youtube for some guests to view. They are waiting for me, and unfortunately that takes precedence over anything else.Nishidani (talk) 19:23, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

I'm trying to give you an opening to retract or amend your statements and characterizations which on Wikipedia are personal attacks and incivil, such as speculating on editors' motivations, insisting any good faith content dispute is a waste of time, continuously whinging on about obscure references in impenetrable walls of text, and refusing to get the point or acknowledge at all that there is a civility issue. Good day. Andre🚐 19:55, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Actually, it is close to midnight here (the film was The Scapegoat (1959, with a script by Gore Vidal) , and tomorrow's forecast of cloud and rain mean I will be deprived of a good day to enjoy the pleasures of gardening. I appreciate the sentiment of generosity in offering me an opportunity to apologize for something I did not do. What you call incivility is, I think, within the leeway of editors' rights to remonstrate if threads just drag on inconclusively for months and months. I think it an objective fact that the talk pages, for three months, have been characterised by misbehaviour, whatever the intentions of some interlocutors, covered by WP:IDIDNOTHEARTHAT. To persistently revive variations on arguments that have been comprehensively deconstucted and buried, and thereby assume that other editors must, again and again waste valuable time, at the risk of repeating themselves to their own annoyance, once more addressing the same old unfocused disgruntlements, is, in real world terms, uncivil. To consistently, in argument, give the impression one is unfamiliar with the scholarly sources that others have diligently read and yet demand that one's guesses or impressions about them must be treated seriously, even for several days of headachy exchanges that give no evidence of having grasped the point, is uncivil. To expect that anyone (and, see the above, I am not alone in this), must never let slip the slightest innuendo that this tiresome behaviour is aggravating in its resolute demand to be heard and reheard, is uncivil. It is uncivil, then, when this peculiar impasse keeps repeating itself, to resort to AE to ban people as uncivil, when they have reasonable grounds for remonstrating over the extraordinary lengths, over months, editors of long standing are expected to go to to keep listening to the same arguments, the same words, the same misconceptions, the same frailty of command over the core academic sources. It is uncivil, indeed indecent, to impugn a reputable academic source by raising the issue of the ethnicity of its author(ess) a Palestinian. It is incompetent to challenge a book she published in 2012, which we use, by referring to one review (by Alan F. Segal) of a book she wrote in 2001. I could go on for several hours excavating the weird indifference to fundamental methods of analysis and argument I have read in these threads for months, but, after midnight, Henry James commands my attention. Perhaps it's his style which makes my own inferior prose so unreadable , and offensive. Yes, dammit, I'll blame him. Unfortunately, he's dead and I can't take him to AE. Perhaps my own impression that I have been very patient with what I privately think is a persistence in making pointless arguments is flawed. I'll leave that to AE. I think all that has to be said has been said here, so let's drop it. Pursue it elsewhere. Nishidani (talk) 22:21, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

I, uh, I guess I should go to my talk page and ask me to stop making comments like that? Levivich (talk) 00:36, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

However this ends up (my guess is I'll cop a term in porridge, but I eat that for breakfast most mornings so I'll enjoy it), instead of the virtual barnstar you deserve, I suggest something practical. If you ever come by Rome, drop me a note here (of course, provided I'm still kicking, (rather than rattling the bucket!)). I think the least I can do to thank you is to suggest lunch on me, and a pleasant stroll through its archaeology and architecture (with no other matters like wiki etc., disturbing the serenity of the day). Best regards Nishidani (talk) 22:51, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

You lucky so-and-so, Rome is one of my favorite cities. I will let you know next time I'm in town! I'm going to get there in the next few years. Levivich (talk) 04:03, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

The lucky one is the one who gets a Nishidani guided tour through all the sites you might have never seen. nableezy - 14:38, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

The world's foremost authority on Gaza

here Norman Finkelstein Nishidani (talk) 14:26, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

In recent weeks, Norman Finkelstein on his blog has been providing additional context and insights into Gaza. Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:28, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks indeed. I try to avoid checking his blog frequently, and do so only once a month. I refrain because he anticipates most of what I would think, and reading him before I thought things out myself would be economical, but an inducement to mental laziness. It is very rare to encounter a brilliant mind informed by a moral passion which however never muddles the lucid analysis of the facts. There have been two Holocaust voices that stand out, that, formerly, of Elie Wiesel and that of Norman Finkelstein. One made a fortune out of it, the other had his career destroyed and his life ghettoized because he absorbed in the marrow of his being the experiences in the Warsaw ghetto, Auschwitz and elsewhere of his parents, and drew a general, not an ethnic, lesson for how to read history, all history and empathize with its silenced victims.Nishidani (talk) 10:33, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

I have a great deal of respect and admiration for Norman Finkelstein, exactly because of the reasons you have so beautifully articulated.

I was going to write more about both Elie Wiesel (a sellout) and Finkelstein, but my cat is persistently demanding my attention, he is ready for his dinner followed by our customary evening walk in our neighborhood. He sends his love to his granpa Nishidani. Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:25, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Israel’s Kristallnacht, by Bruce Neuburger. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 04:25, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Every morning over here in Normandy I watch from the kitchen a plump band of collared doves pecking for breakfast under the spreading boughs of a huge copper beech. Their smooth grey-milky plumage always leaves me floundering for adjectives that might capture the exquisite tonality of their feathered forms. They are now especially thick on the ground, after I spent some time the other afternoon wheeling the tractor’s blade over the groundcover to churn and shred the thick falls of beechmast. Now and then, a couple of tough black crows land with a thump, quickly shouldering their way in that thuggishly assertive gait of theirs, to elbow in on the rich turf. The doves quickly shy out of their way, keeping to the grazing patches that the intruders don’t broach. My host has a quaint phobia about them and often shoos them away, despite my reminder to her that nature is where birds fly round uncooked. Some time back, I suddenly imagined, analogically while looking on, Ostjuden life in a stetl, where the rowdy rhythm of routinized life would be abruptly ruffled by loutish incursions from the outside, foreboding to the wary a possible intimation of pogroms in the air, and, consequently, of those that took place along Gaza’s eastern rim in the kibbutzim. Observing the scene this morning, I suddenly thought of a favourite passage from William James:-

‘We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughterhouses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.” (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience 1902, Fontana ed.1960 p.103)

A man once tried, apparently, to murder me in Kfar Aza. I was due to leave in the morning so the night before, having bought 50 small bottles of beer, I ‘shouted’ a farewell party for 10 friends, located away from the kibbutz in a thickly wooded eucalyptus forest, where there was a hut in a clearing. We drank and chiakked for several hours, one after another of the invited mates trailing off as the booze got the better of them. By 3.30, only I and an Englishman stood our ground, refusing to budge until we’d see who would turn the last bottles into empties. He went outside to pee, didn’t come back, and all I could hear was the rustling of leaves, and some movement in the wood as I listened to a strange full-throated wolf-cry. I called out his name for ten minutes, then felt something like a small onset of anxiety. I knocked down the last bottle, walked out and headed for the trail back to the kibbutz, and, as I did, a burr of rushing footsteps and the howling voice came up behind me. I took to my heels, and the panic drained away as, confident in my fleetness – I was a long distance runner at school –I ran fast back to the kibbutz, squiggled under a concertina-wired fence and dodging Druze guards, got back to our rooms where a light was still burning. I found the missing person’s wife, and several others, sitting up worried for us, and told them what had happened. She suddenly revealed that her husband Had manic psychotic episodes associated with the full moon. A half an hour later, as we mulled the prospect of alerting the guards to allow us to make a search party, there was a knock on the door: he entered smiling and dismissed his wife’s asking him if he’d had one of his attacks. After a few minutes, he collapsed on a bed, began frothing at the mouth and howling like a wolf, his eyes lit up as he mumbled: ’He’s got the wind up all right. He’s shitting himself. I’ll kill the bastard, kill him…’, ostensibly reliving the episode I described.

This was before the long process of what Sara Roy, the world’s foremost expert on the Gazan economy, called Israel’s political economy of De-developing the Strip, before the endless assaults that use the most sophisticated armaments in the world to regularly raze to the ground, at a secure, eagle’s eye distance, its dense urban infrastructure, and, it is said ‘collaterally’, murder several thousand civilians over the last 20 years while taking out several hundred Hamas militants; long before snipers could, every Friday for 18 months, systematically target and shoot dead, with superb nonchalance, pour encourager les autres, 230 youths marching to the separation fence to protest their fatal incarceration in a strip of land where even the little water they drink is toxic. Another 9,000 were wounded or gassed. So though horrified by the beserkers’ butchery, the triumphant cries of Idbah al yahud, I can’t help recall Auden’s line in 1 September 1939:-

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

And so many scenes witnessed by a generation growing up in Gaza, of children with their heads blown off, or fathers wandering deranged from the rubble clasping bits a pieces of their children’s bodies in their hands, long before this bloodbath.

I’ve never been comfortable with that apophthegm in Torquato Tasso (is it?): ‘was wir verstehen, das können wir nicht tadeln’ (We can’t lay blame when we have understood something), if only because evil resists exhaustive understanding. But if by chance one grows up with an ear close to the ground (and grind) of a colonial history full of adventurous yarns about how in the good ol’ days the men would go out after a splendid lunch at a bush station (ranch) with families and friends, for a bit of leisurely hunting, creeping up to some reported riverbed where stray families of dispossessed aborigines were last reported camping, to wipe them out, or, as one of my ancestors did, befriending Wurundjeri who had occasionally stolen sheep from his flocks when he squatted their tribal lands, by regular gifts of flour to make damper and then, when they accepted the custom as a form of payment, lacing it with strychnine that wiped out several members of one clan, then one can never read of these modern instances without thinking of the point William James made. We in the customized ease and comfort of modernity simply cannot grasp the real, immiserated world either beyond our Western suburban civilization or beneath it, in its dark history.

I was taught as a child to murmur to myself: ’there but for the grace of God go I,’ whenever tragedy struck, and maturity extended this even to murderers. Moral outrage, with its eager henchman, revenge, comes easy to us all, while pity suffers from the attrition of the ever more abundant violence of history.* Frisk the cat grandfatherly under her chin. Best Nishidani (talk) 14:57, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

• I am now deeply moved to learn that Yesh Din’s Ziv Stahl, a Kfar Aza resident who survived the massacre, publicly opposed revenge and spoke of the tragic plight Palestinians were suffering over the border. Orly Noy Listen to Israeli survivors: They don’t want revenge +972 magazine 25 October 2023.
• Coincidence as usual. I make an edit about the destruction of bakeries in Gaza, then return to my reading, totally unconnected to any wiki interest, and immediately come across this note re de Gaulle in his first stay in Poland after WW1. ‘Notre civilisation tient à peu de chose, dit-il, toutes les beautés, toutes les commodités, toutes les richesses dont elle est fière auraient vite disparu sous la lame de fureur des masses désespérées . .Il ne peux oublier ces ‘’interminables files de femmes, d’hommes et d’enfants hagards attendant des heures à la porte du boulanger municipal le morceau de pain noir hebdomadaire’’ Max Gallo, De Gaulle, Robert Laffont 1998 volume 1 p.172.

Nakba denial

I know you're retired, and far be it from me to disturb your book scribbling, but I've created Nakba denial and I was wondering if you had any pointers on grossly overlooked sources or perspectives. Iskandar323 (talk) 19:28, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

No book scribbling. A friend took a photo of me today, on my knees, tweezing out with my fingers weed blade after weed blade from a pebble garden whose plastic undersheath has succumbed to nature's rooted refusal to be suffocated. I still have forty square metres to pluck clean. Occasionally I make tea, interrupt the Gordon Lightfoot/Roy Orbison/Righteous Brothers etc (being in Normandy I also checked out Johnny Hallyday's French version of Unchained Melody. pas mal, but he couldn't imitate Bobby Hatfield's soaring crescendo of register in the climax) crooning from youtube to glance at wiki. Thanks for the Nakba denial article, a good solid start. Unfortunately reading it, I noted that doddering PA quisling in his dotage declared it a criminal offence to deny the nakba. If we set precedents for criminalizing the refusal to accept the facts of anything, science or history, nakba/holocaust etc., then half of mankind will risk a term or two in porridge (including a few dear wiki editors) for one thing or another. But for some months I will have precious little spare time from doing what I do best, nothing. Keep up the good work.Nishidani (talk) 21:59, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

I saw your note on Kfar Asa - what I wasn't able to note, since it's been archived, is that page began with a count of 200 casualties, based on a Russian language source of all things and alongside the infamous 40 babies, long before any sort of due diligence kicked in. The drastic revisions in numbers, and the likes of the Russian source we have here, can't help but give one the feeling that the entire information cycle has been taken for a pretty almighty ride. Iskandar323 (talk) 10:00, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

It's predictable. Someday one will have to write an article on deliberate information distortion in this area.On another related matter, have we an article on Settler attacks during the Hamas-Israel war?

Quite a large amount of reportage mentions this, some in considerable detail, i.e.

But after weeks of intense settler violence in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, Zanuta’s 150 residents have made a collective decision to leave. Armed settlers – some in reservist army uniforms, some covering their faces – have begun breaking into their homes at night, beating up adults, destroying and stealing belongings, and terrifying the children. (Bethan McKernan ‘A new Nakba’: settler violence forces Palestinians out of West Bank villages The Guardian 31 October 2023).

Some background can be found in David Dean Shulman’s review of Nathan Thrall’s new book, in the New York Review of Books 19th October where he writes:

over recent months, attacks by settlers intensified. They frequently invaded the village, beat and stoned its residents, and brought their own sheep into the Palestinians’ fields, thereby destroying the growing crops…. What finally broke the villagers’ spirits came after a night when armed settlers came into the village, supposedly looking for sheep they claimed had been stolen. They couldn’t find any. The next morning, one of the villagers took his flock out to graze. A policeman turned up, arrested him, announced that the entire flock—thirty-seven sheep—had been stolen and handed it over to the settlers, Meanwhile, settlers blocked the access roads to the village and stoned Palestinians trying to reach their homes. This went on for five consecutive days.

I was there on May 24th, 2023. I saw the last Palestinian trucks leaving with the few possessions the villagers could salvage. The entire village—twenty-seven extended families, over two hundred people, evacuated their homes and moved to various sites in the territories.”

What happened at Khirbet Zanuta repeated itself at A'nizan just across the road the other day ([https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/residents-of-southern-west-bank-hamlet-fleeing-due-to-settler-violence/ 'Residents of southern West Bank hamlet fleeing due to settler violence,' The Times of Israel, 29 October 2023

I'm retired, so I'm not in a position to do this, but it is definitely a subject that deserves its own page.Nishidani (talk) 21:37, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

• Since October 7, Israeli settlers and military have been terrorizing Palestinian communities across the West Bank. At least 10 villages in the South Hebron Hills have been displaced through violence, and over 120 Palestinians have been killed. (Leila Warah, Israeli settler violence has been surging across the West Bank since October 7 Mondweiss 1 November 2023)Nishidani (talk) 15:11, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

  I don't believe we have that yet (unless I'm behind), but I agree its overdue. Iskandar323 (talk) 05:24, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

• This past Saturday morning, Bilal Mohammad Saleh, a Palestinian sidewalk vendor of sage and thyme, went out with his family to pick olives.

It’s olive harvesting season in the West Bank and Mr. Saleh was helping pluck the fruit from the gnarled trees that his family has owned for generations.

Then, four armed Jewish settlers showed up, witnesses said. They started yelling, and the olive pickers stopped what they were doing and began to run.

But Mr. Saleh forgot his phone.

“I’ll be right back,” he told his wife. Two gunshots rang out, and in an instant, Mr. Saleh, who was known for his love of fresh leaves and being a fun dad, was face down in the olive grove, dead. (Jeffrey Gettleman, Rami Nazzal and Adam Sella,How a Campaign of Extremist Violence Is Pushing the West Bank to the Brink New York Times 2 November 2023)

a request

For an old friend, mind working on User:Tiamut/St H Stephan? nableezy - 02:14, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

It's be easy - well, a couple of hours reading the sources - to fix if was then immediately shifted to article space. Otherwise, it would be pointless.Nishidani (talk) 23:46, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

It will be shifted to article space and and DYK proposed for another one on her list. nableezy - 00:12, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Ya tryen ta drag a senile old fart retiré back in'a wikipaedia? The divine Huldra's already dunnit yonks ago.Stephan Hanna Stephan Nishidani (talk) 14:11, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Just want to send a gift to somebody I miss is all. Figured you would too. nableezy - 18:49, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

help

User:Nableezy/aditloas. nableezy - 18:48, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Several thousand Israelis will each have a story like Abed Salama's to tell about what happened 7 Oct. Close to 2 million Gazans will too for what they experienced from October 7 for several months if not, as Netanyahu suggests, indefinitely. I don't expect we'll hear much of the latter, since it will remain oral. This is the way history is usually 'framed' there.

But yeah, I can help there, but you'll have to wait a bit. I'll get a copy of the book in December when I go downunder. Nishidani (talk) 21:33, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

Sderot

I see you decided to hide "ethnic cleansing" under the word "depopulated". It seems inappropriate to me. I again suggest opening a discussion about the latest changes on the article's talk page. Eladkarmel (talk) 09:25, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

The secondary sources all speak of over 400 villagers being driven out of Najd at gunpoint. We have the euphemism 'depopulated' which is widespread on wiki but used in the passive voice, meaning editors 'hide' the facts about who did the depopulating, which however in the best historical sources always has an historical actor, namely various parts of the Israeli forces fighting at that time.

I already posted on the talk page what you request me to do. There I note that your own edit removed facts in a form of historical denialism, asserting that there is something controversial about the facts. The pot calling the kettle black. If you excise historical facts referrable to first rate sources, on wiki, you are edit warring.Nishidani (talk) 09:31, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Nomination of Palestinianism for deletion

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Consensus note regarding Israeli settlements

Hi. Can you point me to the consensus note you are talking about in this revert? --Orgullomoore (talk) 23:36, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

For that you will have to ask Nableezy, who organized the consensual phrasing which you will see on every page dealing with Israeli settlements. Someone has manipulated the text on Mehola by adding and the US government (meaning, I assume, the Trump administration) uniquely there, whereas this is not the consensus form agreed on. I.e. someone has rewritten the text while ignoring the source, thus WP:OR.Nishidani (talk) 00:01, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

I found it here. Yes, the USA part should go. I'll do that. --Orgullomoore (talk) 00:05, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Well done. Thanks for your diligence and scruple. Nishidani (talk) 00:08, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Ha! You're welcome. Thank you for keeping calm. --Orgullomoore (talk) 00:11, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

That is indeed it, by the time I saw this you had already found it. Though there was a later discussion that sought to overturn that RFC, but it ended with no consensus. I can find that if you need me to. But, remarkably, that discussion ended what had been a conflict that spanned dozens of pages over years with topic bans for all sides, and it’s held up for the 14 years (god damn I been here too long). Everybody is of course welcome to see if consensus has changed. nableezy - 04:44, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Noooo... I honestly think it's a decent result. I was just under the impression that we're not supposed to imply conclusions from broader statements even if the connection is obvious. For example, [1], [2], [3]. With that impression I removed this consensual statement from a settlement article I came across in proofreading the Hamas article, which Nishidani reverted me on. But if there is relative peace and quiet and people are not fussing about this "The world knows settlements in occupied territories are illegal, but Israel believes this does not apply to them," then my position is we should let well enough alone. --Orgullomoore (talk) 04:56, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

We generally aren’t, and if somebody wanted to push it they could probably insist on including only a reference that includes that specific settlement but that will almost always be trivially simple. The consensus came around to just using the BBC general ref even though I agree it isn’t the best source (I’d go with the Barak Erez source in the lead of International law and Israeli settlements personally cus then I can be like uh look at her job to anybody challenging it as biased) but the fact that the most notable thing about almost all of these places is that they violate GCIV will typically make it pretty easy to find a specific ref for each. nableezy - 05:16, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Personal Notes

• More children have been killed in Gaza in the past three weeks than the total killed in conflicts around the world in every year since 2019, Save the Children said.(Rory Carroll, Peter Beaumont, Israeli forces appear to be advancing on Gaza City from two sides, The Guardian 30 October 2023

Nishidani (talk) 14:37, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

• Rafael Eitan, in an address to the Knesset as far back as 1983 once spoke of Palestinians as drugged cockroaches scurrying in a bottle. I.e. 'When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle.’(Lawrence Joffe, ’ Lieut-Gen Rafael Eitan,’ The Guardian 25 November 2004

That was a bit too gentle. In an imitation of classical antisemitic cartooning we now get this Nishidani (talk) 14:57, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

Israel is using the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack as its latest excuse to commit genocide against the Palestinian people. Ijon Tichy (talk) 18:44, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

I had read the article you allude to, before your first mention of it earlier. I should have replied but it is such a long (and very good) article it would have required a lengthier analysis than I have had time to do justice to for the moment. I would still insist that one should call things by their proper name, which in this case, as has been amply apparent since 1948, the structural logic of Zionism dictates ethnocide rather than genocide, despite many notable figures from politicians to influential rabbis speaking directly of the need to finish 'them' off over the last decades. That doesn't make things more palatable via a euphemism: it just fits the record better. It is true that massacres played an important role in the establishment of the state - Benny Morris records 24, the Palestinians upwards of 60 such incidents in 1947-1949, - and that they continued intermittedly, the Rafah massacre affecting Gazan's memory in particular (Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi if I recall correctly saw his uncle mowed down at Khan Younis by an Israeli death squad, something which drew him decades later, into Hamas).* But the point has usually been to seed the kind of panic that leads to mass flight, as when in July 1948 the Palmach threw grenades, or in one account, shot a missile into a mosque full of refugees, killing hundreds of Muslims taking refuge there, and thereby, as with the Deir Yassin massacre earlier that year the flight of tens of thousands).

Aref al-Aref, whose honesty with figures shamed his contemporary Israeli historical colleagues (it was he who established that the figures for Palestinians murdered at Deir Yassin were less than half the figure the Irgun boasted of) estimated that 13,000 Palestinians died in 1948. Almost all of Israel's 6,000 fatalities in the war fell fighting Arab armies in formal combat. The gap has never been explained.

The systematic fragmentation into 165 bantustans of Palestinians in the West Bank is not genocidal, but ethnocidal - as hamula structures, kinship, become the primary locus of identity. One of the technical problems facing Israel in destroying Gaza - plans envisage extending the border significantly into the Strip to 'protect the (reconstructed) kibbutzim' by thereby seizing that 25% of the land which is agriculturally fertile) is that 2.3 million will be squeezed into an even more crowded, foodless and waterless inferno, forcing identitarian consolidation rather than the ethnocidal dispersion engineered for the West Bank.

Nathan Thrall's historical observation (in his The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine , 2017), that in the history of Palestine/Israel, Palestinians have always initially protested the usurpation of their rights peacefully and, on each four occasions, have found their strikes/ civil demonstrations put down with furious violence, first by the British Mandatory Authorities and then by Israel, after which they have had recourse to the same language as their adversaries, holds even in the latest case, the fifth. This October war comes in the wake of The Great March of Return, a civil protest demanding an exit from the world's largest concentration camp which lasted for 18 months, openly to be met with by the weekly mowing down of selected protesters, 223 murdered by Israeli soldiers shooting safely from embankments at youths some 100+ metres over the border, and wounding 9,000. Gaza is full of crippled, limping survivors from just that episode.

Rodi Rudoren in The Forward some days ago wrote an essay What if thousands of Gaza residents breached the border fence carrying only Palestinian flags?. She never asked herself the same question of Israel adopting a different response every time over the last 75 years when Palestinians, including Hamas, have sought a stay in the violence. Again, the Palestinians are failed for not proving themselves more pacifistic than their masters.

The latest statistics suggest that 1,000 children are being killed in Gaza each week, and Israel states that it will be a long war.('It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries.'(That is the first time, albeit privately, that Israel has admitted that, in defiance of international law, it thinks disprortionately killing large numbers of civilians to achieve its aims is legitimate. The parallel made is all the more extraordinary because Nazi Germany and Japan were major powers occupying other countries. Israel is the belligerent occupying power in this case) Michael D. Shear, David E. Sanger and Edward Wong, 'Biden’s Support for Israel Now Comes With Words of Caution,' The New York Times 30 October 2023)Nishidani (talk) 23:39, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

• There can be no equivocation over Hamas's resort to terrorism, but at the same time, when a string of six retired and historically illiterate Australian Prime Ministers try to elbow their way back into the headlines by screaming about some putative 'cult of death', one can't but murmur that three serial terrorists later rose to be the elected leaders of Israel. The 7th,Paul Keating, an extremely well-read man, withheld his signature. Perhaps he recalled what Churchill stated in the House of Commons on the 17th November 1944, in commemorating his friend Lord Moyne who had been assassinated some days earlier by Lehi:

If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins' pistols and our labours for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past. (Andrew Roberts,Churchill:Walking with Destiny, (2018) Penguin ed. 2019 p.846 - I read that yesterday and checking, see that the wiki page on Moyne quotes from Hansard a primary source. Roberts' book should replace the source.)Nishidani (talk) 00:24, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

That quote from Churchill, if unsurprising in the context, is a remarkable one. Iskandar323 (talk) 09:30, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

Just a reminder that Helena is worth reading, as usual. Nowadays she's active mostly on her new site globalities. --NSH001 (talk) 08:31, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Neil and sorry for neglecting to reply. I've been shifting loads of mulch, and with what free time left over, reading bios of people who had some claim to political greatness, (at the moment Jean-Luc Barré's monumental De Gaulle: Une Vie,) something that has disappeared from the world's horizon in recent decades. Sometimes I think anyone aspiring to political office should be asked to accept a public interrogation consisting of a spelling bee, and one hundred select questions on history - and they'd have to get a C grade before obtaining a right to candidature. That reflection arose when, during a summit in Rome, as big shots sat for a photo opportunity in the heart of Rome, they were asked to name the 7 (actually 11) hills of ancient Rome. Boris Johnson has a reputation as an ancient history buff, fluent in classical languages, and screwed up. I read yesterday an overview by Alain Gresh entitled Barbares et civilisés (Le Monde diplomatique Novembre 2023 pp.1,17) a trenchant historical analysis of the imposture of Western geopolitical discourse, with its comfortable distinction between civilised nations that can affirm themselves as legal great powers on the basis of genocidal colonialism and the 'savages' who, after decades, 'answer' their massacres and dispossession by rising up to slaughter even innocents among their tormentors. The latter are dismissed as 'terrorists' and the middle class press is awash with grievance and outrage calling for revenge, as if only those with dish washers, nice homes, fine educations merit empathy and earn the right to exact massive retribution against entire populations in which the terrorists are embedded. It's refreshingly asceptic, stringent in its lucid deconstruction of the hysterical partisanship of the mainstream's take (or is that 'takeaway', ugh!) on recent tragedies, which I well recommend, if you can access it. A rare antidote against the flushing of our sensibilities by the constant tide of prestigious drivel you get from the Bernard-Henri Lévy-Thomas Friedman-Anthony Blinken blatherers that add lustre to the slipshod slapdash opinionizing on events . . and the huge sutler army of rocketpolishing bullshit artistes who chime in in the wake of events to make out that even ethnocide must be understood as well, an unfortunate measure to defend the civilised ordure of our contemporary world.Nishidani (talk) 09:08, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers. "A leader of the settlement movement on expanding into Gaza, and her vision for the Jewish state." Written by Isaac Chotiner, published in The New Yorker, 11 Nov 2023. Ijon Tichy (talk) 17:58, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

That's the usual piddling murmur in the mainstream press that, yes, Israel also has its problems but these are individuals, minorities, groups like settlers or hilltop youth. The military and political elite, the heart of Zionism, is, to judge from the following florilegium of statements, beating along quietly with the so-called disruptive margins of Israeli society. Read,slowly,

Yaniv Cogan and Jamie Stern-Weiner, 'Fighting Amalek in Gaza: What Israelis Say and Western Media Ignore,' Norman Finkelstein.com 12 November, 2023

It would be remarkable for anyone who doesn't follow events over the decades there, but will be ignored, at least until Finkelstein writes the definitive account of this final episode in the extinction of Gaza, and even thgen responses will be buried in book reviews. Remarkable because almost all of those statements in a wartime context express, boastfully, criminal intentions, with no more restraint than Mein Kampf.Nishidani (talk) 16:33, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

I hope someone out there is compiling an encyclopedic list of moronic comments made by journalists interviewed for their insights into the present conflict. A few minutes ago, I learnt from one of these authoritative donkeys that after Hamas is eradicated, the world must build a university in the Gaza Strip (whose several universities apparently don't exist) where Novel Prize Winners will teach this unfortunate people, so long indoctrinated to hate, to learn the virtues of peace. Reality check here.(Just anecdotally, many of the 37,000 who annually study for their finals have to do so with candleliught, given the chronic power outages)Nishidani (talk) 23:19, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Typo?

This looks like you went in to fix a typo but deleted a line instead. Iskandar323 (talk) 23:10, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

I'll readily confess to advanced senescence, but most of the many errors I make seem due to the neopaleolithic laptop I use. It's fine for reading, with just a four inch window, but plays up tremendously if two windows are open, and the mouse has developed an A1/Chatbox capacity to run amuck according to its own lights, or darks. I fixed a reduplicated piece of copy and pasted text there.Nishidani (talk) 09:14, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Ha. There's no problem is there. I misread the edit. My mistake for peering at screens late at night. My eyes played a trick on me, and I don't even have your antiquated tech excuse to save me. Iskandar323 (talk) 12:17, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

'Excuse?' Pretext! There's that odd nonsensical expression, a pathetic euphemism, we have about the 'wisdom of old age', which essentially consists of old codgers thinking up dodges and ruses to mask the proliferating spoors of their decline and fall(ure), ways of covering up for the foibles of the enfeebled. It's not a matter of lacking a quid or two to pop out and buy a new laptop, but rather a canny feeling that were I to manage such a rational solution, I'd lose any residual excuse or pretext I have for explaining orthographical and other screw-ups. Come to think of it (and at this stage one does gradually come around to actually doing a bit of thinking), 'the wisdom of old age' is a somewhat evil smear on younger generations: it implies one is stupid until one's senescence kicks in, the opposite of the case. Cheers. Keep up the good work.Nishidani (talk) 13:10, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

People are often criticised for the indelicacy of wearing their hearts on their sleeves. In an age where evidence for that organ's survival is growing scarcer by the day, perhaps the practice warrants less disdain, but only in so far as the shirt itself is cut from the cloth of intimate historical recall. Watching the Palestinian Trail of tears (almost all of Israel's history can be read as a systematic, consciously applied reevocation of the American Conquest of the West, displaced to the Muddle Yeast), I recalled something I read a few days ago the following description of the flight of French people south out of the way of the German assault on northern France in 1940:-

la situation matérielle, physique, morale d'un peuple jeté sur les routes, mitraillé par les avions ennemis, impuissant à comprendre les raisons du malheur qui l'accable e n'aspirant plus qu'à voir l'issue de son cauchemar.'(the material, physical and moral situation of a people cast out onto the roads, machine-gunned by enemy aircraft, powerless to grasp the reasons for the misfortune which has overwhelmed them and desiring nothing more than to see an end to/escape from their nightmare').Jean-Luc Barré, De Gaulle:Une Vie,Bernard Grasset volume 1, 2023 p.410 13:52, 19 November 2023 (UTC)Nishidani (talk)

I don't get this

Regarding this revert, I think you are saying I' a newbie? What? Also, I am engaging on the talkpage. Can you explain? ☆ Bri (talk) 15:18, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

I dont get why you removed something based on it needing attribution, but you are indeed not a newbie. But you havent really engaged, you answered one of several questions and then declined so far to answer the follow up. nableezy - 15:22, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Newbie to the area, sorry. In any case, the edit summary was inept. To complain that attribution is lacking as a warrant to remove text, instead of providing attribution, is not an adequate motivation and (b) you left in the intercept while, if I recall, taking out the text sourced to it. Bad practice.Nishidani (talk) 15:25, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Notification

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:10, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Hamas

Added your material here Selfstudier (talk) 18:30, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

no words

Haaretz. nableezy - 14:26, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

so,how often has that article been taken up by the mainstream English press?Nishidani (talk) 09:42, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Source for 3% Levantine ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews

Hi Nishidani, thank you for waging the good fight here on Wikipedia on Israel-related articles. In Talk:Khazar_hypothesis_of_Ashkenazi_ancestry, you reference the figure of a 3% Levantine component of Ashkenazi ancestry. I've never seen such a low figure before, do you mind citing it? I'm asking as someone inclined to agree with you on the basis of other investigations; I would appreciate being able to back up such a number. Brusquedandelion (talk) 04:46, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

says 60% fwiw. Selfstudier (talk) 11:40, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

See ELhaik and Das's 2017 paper for the 3% Levantine vs 88% Iranian component. I'd link it but for the fact i am using borrowed computers as a guest and cannot seem to copy and paste anything. Nishidani (talk) 09:33, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

'The Origins of Ashkenaz, Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish,' Frontiers of Genetics June 2017 Selfstudier (talk) 10:25, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

courtesy ping

courtesy ping that another user mentioned your changes in an WP:AE, and they neglected to inform you, so I am. but don't worry. it's not really about you except incidentally. I'm just extending the courtesy of the notification since your friend forgot to. Cheers. Andre🚐 22:05, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

~~~ Merry Christmas! ~~~
Joyeux Noël! ~ Buon Natale! ~ Vrolijk Kerstfeest! ~ Frohe Weihnachten!
¡Feliz Navidad! ~ Feliz Natal! ~ Καλά Χριστούγεννα! ~ Hyvää Joulua!
God Jul! ~ Glædelig Jul! ~ Linksmų Kalėdų! ~ Priecīgus Ziemassvētkus!
Häid Jõule! ~ Wesołych Świąt! ~ Boldog Karácsonyt! ~ Veselé Vánoce!
Veselé Vianoce! ~ Crăciun Fericit! ~ Sretan Božić! ~ С Рождеством!
শুভ বড়দিন! ~ 圣诞节快乐！~ メリークリスマス！~ 메리 크리스마스!
สุขสันต์วันคริสต์มาส! ~ Selamat Hari Natal! ~ Giáng sinh an lành!
Весела Коледа! ~ Meri Kirihimete!

Hello, Nishidani! Thank you for your work to maintain and improve Wikipedia! Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:35, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove and leave other users this message by adding {{subst:Multi-language Season's Greetings}}

And the very best god jul to you too, pal. I apparently got pinged here where it was said that someone put the boot into me in the 23 Dec version of the Spectator (Australia). Read the new link, and came away weeping that either my eyesight was fucked or my late bid for fame had once more been stymied, since I could see no such other mention (apparently it's in some dumbfuck link). The coincidence is that together with the New Yorker and several other quality mags, I bought a recent edition of the Spectator the other day on the strength of its former reputation for some intelligent commentary, and threw it into the dustbin after three moronic articles in succession flushed apparently from pseuds' corner. I shouldn't be surprised: flaunting one's ignorance or lazy disattention for details that disturb the music of one's paid-up chanting in the meme choir no longer stirs even the slightest wince of shame in the thriving world of hack jejeurnalism. Nishidani (talk) 14:29, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Fwiw, the relevant links seems to be in the "Another case is of an experienced editor quoting antisemitism denialists and going on to draw parallels between the current Israeli government and the Nazis." sentence. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 15:08, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

Oh, I see, more or less. In short, the writer of that article appears to be illiterate, unable to construe straightforward prose, or an argument. Well, that is to put the best gloss on that kind of garbling mischief of misreportage. WOADB. Best Nishidani (talk) 21:42, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

When I saw the Maori greeting for Christmas above, I was reminded of hearing the similar Polynesian term, the Hawaiian mele kalikimaka while staying over the Christmas summer break at the Moana Hotel on Waikiki beach in 1964/5. But that just brought back to mind the obscenely foul passage that led me to dump the Christmas edition of Spectator Australia

‘massacre of the innocents’ is certainly a literal and apt description of what occurred less than a hundred kilometres from Bethlehem some two thousand and twenty-three years later. Nearly fifteen hundred innocents mutilated, kidnapped, tortured, raped and /or murdered in the most grotesque and evil fashion. The ramifications and trauma have shaken to the core not only families, friends and loved ones but an entire nation and an entire diaspora scattered round the world. 'Massacre of innocence Spectator Australia 16 December 2023.

(The dunce who copypasted up that pastiche doesn't appear to understand what a pleonasm is, hence the bolded example. As if a diaspora could be other than a scattering of people around the world, the implied antithesis being a 'diaspora in Israel'. Sigh.)

This came with a vignette by Ben Davis who in obtuse cleverness expropriated a Christian image to further the genocidal narrative of a country where mayors in places like Nazareth Illit can still ban that ‘antisemitic’ feastday, where an Israeli sniper* can take out, first an elderly Christian mother, Nahida Khalil Anton and then her 50 year old daughter Samar as she rushed to succour her within the protective precincts of the Holy Family Church in Gaza. And where, in solidarity with Gaza, and bowing to necessity as Israel’s long stranglehold on Bethlehem makes this year’s visits to the nativity virtually impossible, authorities have cancelled the event, though the nativity scene now shows a baby buried in rubble.

In reading that callous piece of mindless trash, I couldn’t avoid yet another possible definition of a type of Zionist in abstracto.

‘A Zionist is someone who, coming unhappily across some mention that 8,000 Palestinian children have been murdered under the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, murmurs to assuage any residual twinge of unease, ‘yeah, but what about the 40+ Jewish under 18 year olds** murdered by Hamas terrorists on 7th October.’

The thought of one crushed life, if Jewish, cancels out any thought of the 200 parallel non-Jewish/Palestinian lives smashed by Israeli retaliation because, well, they're not special, like us. Judaism appears to have no answer to the abyss into which Zionism is driving its adherents, esp. since a Zionist could cite scripture in self-justification, i.e. psalm 137, l.9:'Blessed is the one who seizes and dashes your children against the rock.'

• If one has to measure reliability by the source, then I take the very diplomatically cautious Franciscan Pierbattista Pizzaballa’s word for it over whatever a spokesman for the chronically duplicitous and mendacious IDF spokespeople might say. If only also because that same day, 17 December, the lads of the world’s most moral army blew up with a tank shot the generator and fuel stocks of the convent of the Sisters of Mother Teresa in the same area, rendering the 54 disabled people there homeless.
  • Casualties of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war tells us that, according to the Times of Israel, as of 4 December, 49 Jewish/Israeli children and youths were killed: two infants; 12 children under the age of 10, and a further 36 aged 10-19. I wrote 40+ because, under Israeli secular law 18 is the legal age for the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and therefore upping that to 19, uniquely, here appears to play a numbers game. How many 18-19 year olds, adults, figure among the 36 children?

If only the 800,000 children now wintering in famine conditions in camps reeking with shit from burst sewage spills could chance to see, on at least one quiet night, after a minimal meal something as profoundly instructive as this, speaking to their fright.Nishidani (talk) 03:32, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

Managing a conflict of interest

That may be the wrong template; do you have a connection with the topic Nihonjinron? Andre🚐 09:25, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

December 2023

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war. This means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be although other editors disagree. Users are expected to collaborate with others, to avoid editing disruptively, and to try to reach a consensus, rather than repeatedly undoing other users' edits once it is known that there is a disagreement.

Points to note:

1. Edit warring is disruptive regardless of how many reverts you have made;
2. Do not edit war even if you believe you are right.

If you find yourself in an editing dispute, use the article's talk page to discuss controversial changes and work towards a version that represents consensus among editors. You can post a request for help at an appropriate noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, it may be appropriate to request temporary page protection. If you engage in an edit war, you may be blocked from editing. Andre🚐 09:43, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.Andre🚐 09:46, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

The question is, rather, why after being involved first with me, and now with Nableezy, two I/P specialists, in interactions that led to you nearly being topic banned in the first instance, and now topic banned with Nableezy, you straightaway went to an article totally out of your known range of interests, but which happens to be one I edited back in 2006. In my book this is not disinterested. And of course, as a former Japanologist, I know that topic. Looking at your edits it is apparent you are way, way out of your depth. So drop it, and stop shitstirring.Nishidani (talk) 09:50, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Predictable. Well, I trust some admins can see what you're up to. I've wasted enough time pointlessly reasoning with your confusions. Nishidani (talk) 09:50, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

i've edited on Japan for years. I created maneki-neko. Andre🚐 10:16, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Don-t edit this page. Nishidani (talk) 11:44, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

You don't WP:OWN the topic. It has tags for WP:OR and unsourced since 2015 and 2017. I was fixing them. You reverted all the templates and fixes twice. Andre🚐 11:48, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

I told you to get off my page. Your appalling ignorance of that, and several other topics, can surely find some willing interlocutor elsewhere, not here.Nishidani (talk) 12:00, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Your AE ban

[Bishzilla is a little miffed.] The correct way go about these things is alert Superclerk Bishzilla to them! She correct everything, never repercussions! [Smiles at thought of repercussions from tiny regular clerks. Ho ho.] bishzilla _ROARR!! pocket 09:34, 29 December 2023 (UTC).

G'day Bish, though it's midnight downunder and I'm as full as Fatty Arbuckle's sock after a liquid evening round a campfire with a solid gang of 'tradie' friends. Well, nah, no wuz, fageddit. It's probably to the good that Sandstein permabanned me from commenting there, all round, but your kindness is, as always, much appreciated. I made myself useful tonight by just listening, and, unobtrusively, watching the dazzle of the southern hemisphere nightsky, as bright in the bushland backblocks as it was in my childhood, and coming back to see your note was a nice chime of further illumination! Have a great New Year. Best Nishidani (talk) 12:36, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Revert

Hi. Just wondering why you felt the need to do this reversion, as a "retired" user, on a talk page that isn't yours, with the rude remark (You had your say. Go away)? I'm not one to pick fights, or to purposely wade into I-P, but I don't like having my legitimate comments reverted with a rude remark as the justification. Can't you just leave it alone? JM (talk) 01:17, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

I reverted it because apparently it was you who 'just can't leave it alone.' Nishidani (talk) 02:15, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

It was one single comment on a relevant public talk page. The only one I've ever made to that person's page. Let's not be unecessarily combative, I know tensions are high, but you must know that was inappropriate. It's not your talk page, as far as I know the only person allowed to remove comments from a user talk page is the user themselves. Which they did once I restored my comment, but that doesn't negate what you did. JM (talk) 02:32, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

Wanna go into it in more detail? I see you are very young, so perhaps you are not quite familiar with good manners. When one posts on another person's page, one is addressing someone. You do not address Nableezy, you refer to this user. When you do that, you are signalling that your intended reader is not Nableezy, but editors who have Nableezy's page on their watchlist. That is offensive. I read it as a provocation. And, since grammatically, the post is not directed at Nableezy, I'll remove it again. If Nableezy is less concerned about the niceties of polite usage than I, he can restore it and tell me to fuck off in good grace. Nishidani (talk) 02:51, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

If you're not willing to follow WP:REMOVED and WP:USERTALKSTOP you should probably avoid user talk pages altogether. You should also refer to the guideline that says we must always directly address a user to whom a user talk page is connected in the second person. You should also assume good faith; my comment was not directed at the watchlist, but at the participants of the discussion, including the user. I was unaware that editors use the watchlist for user talk pages (I certainly don't). It was not my intention to push you on this, but you still seem unaware of (or unwilling to follow) those user page policies and guidelines, so I think that I should just make you aware of them again. It would be beneficial if you could link the policy/guidline you refer to when you say I must refer to a user in second person on their talk page. JM (talk) 03:03, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

No doubt one could ratchet up thousands of edits with this tedious jejune backchat, but not here. A lot of people cite policy without understanding it. I just construe sentences, and yours is as I construed it, rude. So, there's a good laddie. Off you go. Nishidani (talk) 03:16, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

Closure of hospitals

I've yet to see, but I don't read around that much, any mention of what is the most logical explanation for the systematic closing down of hospitals throughout the Israeli controlled north. Since they have no strategic value to anyone, one reasonable conjecture is that the whole Gazan system of registering deaths is centered on hospitals, esp. al-Shifa. The procedure is that deaths are entered into the register as corpses or the dying are carried there, and a preliminary control is made by technicians to correlate the dead, and identify them, with archival records. Once this is done, the resulting data is collated and the statistics are updated. If one dismantles the hospitals and their administrative staff, no further empirical work of precise record-keeping would be possible, something also consolidated by the lack of power to maintain or recharge servers and computers. Perhaps something like that infrastructure survives in Khan Younis and Rafah, but the data from the north would, I suppose, now be frozen. Worth keeping an eye out for this technical issue if RS come round to examining it. Nishidani (talk) 18:04, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Palestinian hospitals have very significant strategic value to the Israeli government's overarching goal of ethnic cleansing the Palestinians. By destroying or severely damaging hospitals and other healthcare infrastructure, and killing large numbers of doctors, nurses, paramedics and other medical staff, the Israeli gov't aims to significantly increase the suffering and misery of Palestinian civilians, including - but not limited to - drastically curtailing the ability of the Palestinian healthcare system to ward-off the spread of infectious diseases including pandemics, epidemics etc. The Israeli gov't is hoping that this would lead to significantly higher numbers of dead, near-dead, severely sick or permanently maimed innocent Palestinians, especially among the weaker segments of Palestinian society i.e. children, the elderly, the infirm, etc.

More generally, see this. ---- Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:16, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

The Epidemiological War on Gaza (5 January 2024). By Maya Rosen, published in Jewish Currents. "Disease is poised to become an even deadlier second front in Israel’s assault on the besieged Strip." Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:16, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

Might like this book

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba, Stanford University Press 2023 TrangaBellam (talk) 18:28, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. But it is very hard to speak of liking a genre of books that dwell on the slow triumph of deceit, detonation and dispossession which is essentially what IP history is.Nishidani (talk) 23:49, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Israeli sources on friendly fire 7-8 October

Since the mainstream sources in English refuse to mention what the Israeli press is stating, the only way to get an RS-quality picture is to systematically comb the four sources above and cite the material from RS they cite or allude to.

• Quique Kierszenbaum '‘It was a pogrom’: Be’eri survivors on the horrific attack by Hamas terrorists,', The Guardian 11 October 2023

The counterattack on Be'eri was conducted by Major General Itai Veruv.

Building after building has been destroyed, whether in the Hamas assault or in the fighting that followed, nearby trees splintered and walls reduced to concrete rubble from where Israeli tanks blasted the Hamas militants where they were hiding. Floors collapsed on floors. Roof beams were tangled and exposed like rib cages

The Hamas militants held hostages. So stating that tank fire was used to blast kibbutz buildings where Hamas militants were hiding only begs the question: were Israelis detained by them also present in those buildings?

• Yoav Zitun, tricked Israeli helicopters, and pilots over WhatsApp | The Air Force on Day 1 Ynet 15 October 2023

• Amos Harel, 'Failures Leading Up to the Hamas Attack That Changed Israel Forever,' Haaretz 20 October. In summary form Harel's article states

Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld, commander of the Gaza Division, when the Erez Crossing and military installations close to it, his own Coordination and Liaison Office were attacked, locked himself and some staff in the subterranean war-room (underground refuges are not unique to Hamas) called down an airstrike on his own base, though many soldiers lay wounded above/outside

Nishidani (talk) 21:17, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Hello Nishidani. There was a subsection in one of the main article related to the 2023 Israel-Gaza war, covering Israeli sources on the October 7 friendly fire. I can't find it now. can you help? Ghazaalch (talk) 04:23, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

I only dropped a note re this on the talk page, listing 3 RS for the matter though noting it was perhaps premature to add to the article itself.I don’t think it’s worth bothering about those articles too much. Some intelligible work can begin when the hundreds of eager editors jumping at the opportunities to make dogleg additions or subtractions to its Protean mess, move on and stop fiddling as Gaza burns. Then editors can do something useful harvesting what scholarship and NGO analysts report in their morticians’ death notes from the various autopsies to be made on the corpus relicti of this 1948 nakba remake. It’s too early, in short to cover this Srebrenica-like massacre as the IDF slowly but triumphantly nudges its meticulously efficient juggernaut trajectory towards the halfway mark as the exhausted world shifts its bleary attention over pancakes and cornflakes, to the fresh breaking news of Sinora’s upandcoming match with Djokevic or the details of a murder case in Italy (55 minutes of breaking news here – whose content details can be summed up as (a) the culprit was arrested (b) the community grieves, and (c) the relatives are distraught)Nishidani (talk) 11:34, 19 November 2023 (UTC) music festival massacre

One may add this to the RS.

An Israeli police investigation indicated an IDF helicopter which had fired on Hamas militants "apparently also hit some festival participants." (Re'im music festival massacre). Josh Breiner, Israeli Security Establishment: Hamas Likely Didn’t Have Advance Knowledge of Nova Festival,' Haaretz 18 November 2023. Nishidani (talk) 19:53, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

When I saw the videos of helicopters (drones?) firing on fleeing figures in a desert landscape , videos promoted by the IDF as evidence of their hunting down Hamas militants, I was disconcerted, thinking 'how do they know those fleeing figures are armed militants as opposed to the numerous Gazans who apparently profited from the breaches in the wall simply to walk around. Soon after, reading of 20 Apache helicopters making 300 strikes that day on people, together with the admission (or fiction) that this aerial fire had been indiscriminate, shooting anyone who ran, as opposed to anyone who walked, and the accompanying suggestion that Hamas had instructed its militants to walk (extremely unlikely and smacking like a cover-up storey to mask from error), I realised that one possibility was that, in the confusion of the day, the many fleeing Israelis might well have been inaddvertently targeted. Breiner's piece now corroborates, apparently, that suspicion. This doesn't mitigate the horror of what terrorists did captured on video, but confirms that some unknown percentage of the listed victims died from 'friendly fire'. We now have at least 4 RS for this.Nishidani (talk) 20:48, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Thank you Nishidani.Ghazaalch (talk) 04:07, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

The Cradle. More ominous insider testimony emerging. Iskandar323 (talk) 20:26, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Missed that, thanks. I.e.'Israel implemented 'mass Hannibal' directive on 7 October: Israeli pilot Col. Nof Erez says the Israeli military likely killed its own civilians in multiple instances on 7 Octob,' The Cradle 20 November

This is not an RS source but it cites the Haaretz original in Hebrew with a link that qualifies. The source is also cited by the Turkish news agency cited above. And that along with the several sources above, means this aspect of 7 October is now acceptably referenced. I would still prefer to wait until however we get the mainstream English sources to cover the issue. Perhaps they will, after the conflict has ended and the simplistic unilinear narrative has served its function of securing consensus for whatever final disaster ensues.Nishidani (talk) 22:52, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

• Analysis: Why is Israel’s military killing so many of its own? (21 December 2023). "The perils of urban warfare, coupled with operational issues within the army, appear to be hobbling Israel’s advance." By Zoran Kusovac for Al Jazeera.
• Analysis: As Israel escalates Gaza war, its ‘kill-rate’ claims don’t add up (9 December 2023). "The claims, aimed at fending off criticism over civilian casualties paint a picture of the war that makes no sense. By Zoran Kusovac for Al Jazeera. Ijon Tichy (talk) 21:53, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

• The directive: prevent (Palestinian attackers) from returning to Gaza "at any cost," even if they are holding Israeli hostages (10 January 2024). Published in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot. "At noon on October 7, the IDF ordered all of its combat units in practice to use the 'Hannibal Directive', although without clearly mentioning this explicit name. The order was to stop 'at all costs' any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, that is despite the fear that some of them have hostages." Ijon Tichy (talk) 15:32, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Official confirmation of what Nof Erez last month, the difference being that the Hannibal directive here was issued at noon, according to that report, whereas we know an informal version of the same was issued within an hour or so of the Hamas attack, and was applied earlier that morning. We'll never know how many of the 1,130+ Israelis were killed by, not 'friendly fire,' but indiscriminate 'hannibal fire' (). Nishidani (talk) 09:44, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Finally some great news that things are getting better in the Gaza Strip

'There has been some incremental improvement in the south. Palestinian deaths, according to statistics from Gaza health officials, have averaged about 171 a day so far in January, down from 230 during the last week of December.' (Karen DeYoung, John Hudson, Despite U.S. pressure on Israel, casualty count in Gaza remains high,' Washington Post 14 January 2024 Nishidani (talk) 04:36, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

I imagine historians can now rewrite WW2. For example, after Kristallnacht, there was an incremental improvement in conditions for Germany's Jews, with a notable drop in the number of Jewish shops smashed and looted (7,500) in the following months. Nishidani (talk) 04:45, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Some other stuff

• Masha Gessen In the Shadow of the Holocaust New Yorker
• Emma Soteriou, 'There are no Christians or churches in Gaza, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem has claimed after the Israeli army killed two women at church,' Leading Britain's Conversation 19 December 2023 Nishidani (talk) 09:10, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

i.e.,Manuel Musallam doesn't and never did exist. It-s extraordinary what influential morons can get away with.Nishidani (talk) 09:14, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for posting these two interesting and informative articles. The long-form essay by Masha Gessen is very good and well worth a read, but regretfully it contains several omissions and inaccuracies - for example, it neglects to mention that Stepan Bandera was directly involved in the murder of many thousands of innocent Jewish civilians, and the article also repeats the Israeli bald-faced lie that 1,200 Israelis were killed by Hamas on Oct. 7-8 when in reality the majority [probably the vast majority] of these 1,200 were killed by the IOF [Israeli Occupation Forces] including IOF heavy fire from attack helicopters, armed drones, tank shells, tank-mounted machine guns and armored-personnel-carrier (APC)-mounted machine guns.

However, in my view these omissions and inaccuracies do not have a significant adverse effect on the overall good quality of the essay by Gessen, and overall this appears to be a thoughtful and insightful essay. What are your thoughts and reflections on this essay? Ijon Tichy (talk) 11:05, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Well it was clear from the first day the figure of 1,400 came out, that it was guesswork. Perfectly rounded figures always are. Now it is down to around 1150, from which some 400 appear to members of the IDF/border/kibbutz police in combat roles. Of the remaining 750 or so non/combatants how the figures will break down for those killed by Hamas and those killed by Israeli forces will remain unclear because of the nature of the subsequent battles to retake the area, and because the forensic neutrality of those controlling the evidence of autopsies will remain suspect. But one must refrain from assuming that, given the success of the Israeli manipulation of the core data to set the tone of the ruling narrative, the truth will be accessible by simply inverting that Israeli narrative, i.e., inferring that the massacres were largely self-inflicted. Hamas almost certainly had units trained to shock and awe by killing Israeli civilians. Most of its operatives grew up from childhood to early manhood witnessing masses of civilian corpses regularly littering their streets, and everyone in the Strip has numerous relatives murdered by 'precision' bombing, sniper or tank fire. Many irregulars also roamed about ready to revenge themselves on any Israeli they came upon. The IDF has a record going back to 1948 of deliberately murdering Palestinians in order to subjugate the population by sheer terror, and that means blowback of similar violence is inevitable. In any case. if you haven't seen it, watch the interview with Paul Rogers here. Unlike 99% of newspaper reportage, he actually understands the historical and comparative context of these events. Gaza is a rerun of Mosul, only a little more thorough as one would expect.Nishidani (talk) 12:48, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Just from a technical viewpoint, there has been since Oct 7 an enormous confusion in the statistics, mixing civilian casualties in Israel and military casualties in the Gaza Strip operation. Rogers notes now that

There are other, wider indications of the IDF’s problems. Official casualty figures have shown more than 460 military personnel killed in Gaza, Israel and the occupied West Bank and about 1,900 wounded. But other sources suggest far greater numbers of wounded. Ten days ago, Israel’s leading daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, published information obtained from the ministry of defence’s rehabilitation department. This put casualty numbers at more than 5,000, with 58% of them classed as serious and more than 2,000 officially recognised as disabled. There have also been a number of friendly fire casualties, with the Times of Israel reporting 20 out of 105 deaths due to such fire or accidents during fighting. Paul Rogers, 'Israel is losing the war against Hamas – but Netanyahu and his government will never admit it,' The Guardian 22 December 2023

When the White House announced additional funding to UNRWA for its Gaza emergency response, Almadhoun said he had to balance gratitude with reality. “OK, yes you are giving a mom a can of tuna, but you also killed her son and bombed her house,” he says he told Biden administration officials.' Rhana Natour, 'He’s raising millions in aid for Gaza. But still he couldn’t save his family,' The Guardian 22 December 2023

• Damien Gayle and Nina Lakhani, 'Flooding Hamas tunnels with seawater risks ‘ruining basic life in Gaza’, says expert,' The Guardian 23 December 2023
• Visual Evidence Shows Israel Dropped Bombs Where It Ordered Gaza Civilians to Go (22 December 2023). A New York Times investigation used aerial imagery and artificial intelligence to detect bomb craters that showed that Israel dropped many two-ton bombs - in addition to smaller bombs - in south Gaza, in the same locations where it specifically ordered Palestinians to go when it ordered them to evacuate their homes. Video posted on the official YouTube channel of The New York Times. Ijon Tichy (talk) 00:44, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

• 'In a Dec. 21 video report based on analysis of “aerial imagery and artificial intelligence” — headlined “Visual Evidence Shows Israel Dropped 2,000-Pound Bombs Where It Ordered Gaza’s Civilians to Move for Safety” — the Times indicated that “Israel used these munitions in the area it designated safe for civilians at least 200 times.” Those 2,000-pound bombs have been “a pervasive threat to civilians seeking safety across south Gaza.” Since the war in Gaza began 11 weeks ago, the Times reported, “the U.S. has sent more than 5,000 2,000-pound bombs” to Israel.' Norman Solomon, President Biden: Learn the Names of Children You’ve Helped Israel to Murder, CounterPunch 27 December 2023.

• In 1969, Israel even devised a scheme to send 60,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Paraguay with offers of lucrative employment. The plan was negotiated between Paraguay’s military dictator Alfredo Stroessner and Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency. It was, of course, purely coincidental that, shortly thereafter, Mossad discovered it no longer had the resources to hunt Nazi fugitives in Paraguay, which had been one of their destinations of choice. The scheme was discontinued when several of its victims, upon realizing the promise of a new life of comfort was all a sham, shot up the Israeli embassy in Asuncion, killing one of its staff. Mouin Rabbani, The long history of Zionist proposals to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip,Mondoweiss 28 December 2023

• Safe zones: Israel’s technologies of genocide (6 January 2024). By Nicola Perugini for AlJazeera. "The designation of safe areas in Gaza allows the Israeli army to carry out war crimes more efficiently and then to deny them." Ijon Tichy (talk) 20:30, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
• On the now obvious Warsaw Ghetto-Gaza analogy

'Political value is not the only merit in underscoring this disturbing comparison. The unsettling analogy is also a crucial means of exploding long-held myths: in other words, that Jewish victimhood is beyond compare, exalted and singular in its gravity. Indeed, it is precisely the exceptionalism with which Israel envelops itself that has allowed the Zionist political elite (wherever it may be – in the US, UK, Europe, or Israel) to flout international law repeatedly for more than 75 years. It is this cultivated sense of transcendent sublimity (arising from the weaponization of the Holocaust and the manipulative use of the Bible) that elevates Israel’s status to an arrogant actor on the world stage, one that is indifferent to all red lines (that is, to virtually all Geneva conventions and UN resolutions). . . Once pitied as the collective victim of genocide, Israel is now the perpetrator, the state that, paradoxically, wields victimhood as its quintessential raison d’être.' Michelle Weinroth, Why we have to make the Jewish Ghetto comparison Mondoweiss 7 January 2024

• The ongoing evidence that the aim is ethnic cleaning per '48

Peter Beinart, What Will Happen to Gaza’s People? New York Times 7 January 2024

• The area referred to below consists of the best, most fertile agricultural land left in the Gaza Strip

Yadlin. . .said the IDF’s southern command, which has responsibility for Gaza, had started planning buffer zones within the territory that would be heavily mined to prevent any repeat of the 7 October attack. Jason Burke, Israel says Gaza fighting could last a year, amplifying fears of regional war The Guardian 8 January 2024

• John Mearsheimer expands on the essay concerning genocide and the institutional apartheid, since 1967, of Israel, in conversation with Glenn Greenwald. About 33 minutes into the link.

Prof. John Mearsheimer on Israel-Gaza, Escalation Risks, Ukraine War, & More 5 January 2024Nishidani (talk) 00:52, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

There appears to be an extension of targeted assassination to influential civilians, i.e. going after a whole family strike after strike. 7 poets have been murdered when their homes were bombed. It reminds me of both the Nazi and Soviet targeting of the Polish elite.

Wael al-Dahdouh al Jazeera’s chief correspondent in Gaza, lost his wife Amna, his son Mahmoud (15) his daughter Sham, and his grandson Adam, aged 1 and a half, on 25th October while sheltering in a private home in Nuseirat refugee camp. Then he himself was wounded by an Israeli airstrike on a school in Khan Younis on 15th of December. Yesterday they took out his son Hamza Dahdouh when a drone hit the car he and other journalists were travelling in en route to the Moraj area.

• The Palestinians don't figure much if at all in the Guinness Book of Records, so I guess they may thank Israel now that they are finally breaking dozens of records for historical firsts that will earn them some proud notoriety. This is the latest one

There are about 700,000 people in the world currently facing catastrophic hunger, 577,000 of them are in Gaza.' Archie Bland,'The numbers that reveal the extent of the destruction in Gaza,' The Guardian 8 January 2024

And this record.

The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, new research reveals.The vast majority (99%) of the 281,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2 equivalent) estimated to have been generated in the first 60 days following the 7 October Hamas attack can be attributed to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by researchers in the UK and US. According to the study, which is based on only a handful of carbon-intensive activities and is therefore probably a significant underestimate, the climate cost of the first 60 days of Israel’s military response was equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tonnes of coal. Nina Lakhani, Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe The Guardian 9 January 2024

• Israeli comic among the ruins of Gaza, showing a kitchen for cooking babies Times of Israel 7 January 2023 Nishidani (talk) 13:45, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
• a couple of Israeli murders of youths in the West Bank and then a jeep running over the body of one of the wounded/dead. Nothing newNishidani (talk) 05:21, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

I see that Israel's finest mind in the sphere of international law, Malcolm Shaw in his preliminary remarks before the ICJ, spoke of the Israelite tribes entry into the land of Israel ca 1,500 BCE. Cripes. Two ridiculous anachronisms (there were no 'Israelite tribes' at that time, and there was no geographical entity called 'The Land of Israel' until at least 500 years later), and one ignoramus-style pratfall in archaeology ('entry') in one sentence. The poor fellow in his greying eminence ought to read a history book, rather than recite the usual Biblical bloopers.Nishidani (talk) 09:49, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Another record. The 29,000 munitions -shells and bombs- Israel has dropped on Gaza in 3 months greatly exceed those (3,678) dropped by the United States between 2004 and 2010 during its Invasion of Iraq.(Nicholas Kristof 'The Things We Disagree On About Gaza,' New York Times 13 January 2024.) Nishidani (talk) 00:24, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

“Anybody who cares seriously about being a Jew is in Exile and would be in Exile even if that person were in Jerusalem.” Eugene Borowitz cited Marc Tracy, 'Is Israel Part of What It Means to Be Jewish?,' New York Times 14 January 2024.

This is a good example of seizing on a topic and consistently failing to think it through while elaborating on its various aspects. So that Israel as a political reality is now perceived as crucial to Jewish identity and has been so for some 70 years but had not been so for 2 millennia, or that anti-Zionism is now a Jewish heresy, yet in 1900 Zionism was widely condemned as a Jewish heresy. As Arendt noted, the essence of Zionism was to repudiate 'exile' by exiling another Semitic people, solving 'the Jewish question' by creating a 'Palestinian question'. The problem of Zionism is that it dumbs down anyone who subscribes to it, since its praxis seeks self-vindication in an appeal to a history of Jewish ethnic dispossession, persecution and alienated scattering while imposing precisely the reality of all three grievances on another people. To affirm Zionism is therefore, logically, to disavow any moral lesson from Jewish history in the diaspora, other than the Hobbsian inference from the Holocaust: we are entitled to be above the law, and may now do unto others (Palestinians) what Europeans did to us. Nishidani (talk) 00:34, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Well, like any generalization that should be tweaked. Ami Ayalon obviously is one of those rare birds a rational Zionist (as many ex Shin Bet directors become ironically), and concludes that the only political outcome that makes sense is to release Marwan Barghouti from jail and have him as a candidate for elections. Emma Graham-Harrison and Quique Kierszenbaum Ex-Shin Bet head says Israel should negotiate with jailed intifada leader The Guardian 15 January 2024

It's the fate of every race to think itself chosen by God. But it's the fate of only a very few races that they're sufficiently stupid as to try to put that into practice.' The Jewish German detective Bernie Gunther in Philip Kerr's If the Dead Rise Not,Quercus 2009 p.305.Nishidani (talk) 06:34, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Israeli occupation of the West Bank

Please self revert this revert, which is currently under talk page discussion (which you have not participated in). And please refrain from accusing me of POV edit (this is the second time you have done so) Longhornsg (talk) 22:54, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Normally in the morning, one breakfasts, has a shit, does a crossword puzzle, while of course thinking over bad edits one has reverted to reply duly with the caffeine etc., kicks in. I was about to jot a note when youi rushed here to protest. But I reverted you, apart from the general excisionist approach on lame pretextual grounds, because in the talk discussion just underway, you asserted no connection in sources with historic apartheid, and, when another editor pointed out one existed (*I.e. you stuffed up, you then dismissed that perfectly academic source saying you disagreed with it. That kind of frivolousness and disattentiveness bodes ill.Nishidani (talk) 23:27, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

The "other" Abu Sitta 2003?

Hello! I'm looking for a source and thought you/your talk page watchers would be a better first stop than WP:RX. The source is:

Salman Abu Sitta, "Israel Biological and Chemical Weapons: Past and Present", Between the Lines, 15-19 March 2003.

That's all the information I have about it. I saw it cited exactly like that in Pappe's 2006 Ethnic Cleansing book, p. 273 n. 35. I have no idea what Between the Lines is and I cannot seem to find that publication (there is a 2007 book with a similar name but it doesn't appear to be the right source), or anything written by Abu Sitta with that title ("Israel Biological and Chemical Weapons: Past and Present"), or anything on Google scholar with that title. When I search Google web for that exact phrase with quotes, the only place I find is in Pappe's 2006 book.

There is of course another Abu Sitta article from 2003 that is often cited, which is this one, but that has a different title ("Traces of Poison"), is in a different publication (al-Ahram Weekly), and a different date, 27 Feb-3 Mar, 2003.

Did Pappe just mis-cite the 2003 Abu Sitta article? Or is there another Abu Sitta article that was published a couple of weeks after "Trace of Poison"? I suspect it may be that it was written in another language (I presume Arabic but maybe something else), and the title Pappe used in his citation is his own English translation, and that's why I'm not finding it. Anybody have any ideas here? If not, I'll ask at RX. Thanks, Levivich (talk) 18:56, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Levivich, apologies for following you here (I'll fully admit that I was curious what you were up to). The "2007 book with a similar name" that you mentioned seems to actually be pretty relevant. Here's what the foreword of the 2007 book Between the Lines says: This book contains a selection of articles from Between the Lines (BTL), a political journal first published soon after the eruption of the Al Aqsa Intifada in late September 2000. BTL was published on a regular basis from Ramallah and Jerusalem until September 2003, when it was forced to stop due to difficulties in its material circumstances. Note 1 (attached to that quote) says this: Between the Lines was cofounded and coedited by Tikva Honig-Parnass and Toufic Haddad in November 2000. From its inception, it was produced on a volunteer basis, with great help provided by our writers and a circle of individuals and organizations who likewise believed in its mission. It ceased publishing as a consequence of its accumulated debt. This review of the book contains some more information about the journal's history. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the journal digitized anywhere (the review says that the journal was mailed to readers around the world—perhaps it was never available online). Malerisch (talk) 15:13, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

It turns out that this journal is present on WorldCat, and there is a website linked: www.between-lines.org. Internet Archive has saved this website, but I was only able to see articles up to February 2003 (so close). There are some sources that cite this website on Google Books and on Google Scholar. Malerisch (talk) 16:43, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

@Malerisch: Hey you can follow me anywhere with research skills like that! Thanks, I think you've solved this riddle. Unfortunately, it looks like Between-Lines.org stopped updating their archives in Feb 2003 (doesn't it figure!), as even as of Oct 2003, their archives page only had archives going up to Feb 2003 [4]. I bet Zero is right and this was just a reprint of the March 2003 article in Al-Ahram Weekly. What are the chances he wrote two articles about the same thing in two different publications in the same month? Idk, but I appreciate you hunting this down! Maybe you can help me find my mind next? I seem to have lost it recently... Levivich (talk) 19:30, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

My apologies to you Lev, and joining you in expressing deep thanks to Malerisch for their timely and insightful response.My access to the internet, since I don't have a laptop or one of those smartphoney thingamijigs is somewhat restricted by continual travelling.(even the police in Seymour detained me, if gently, when they found me enjoying a night walk at 3.30 a.m. Apparently, old men with backpacks sauntering around empty streets looking for a petrol pump and all night cafe where one might intercept trucks at dawn and hitch a ride to a busless destination is thougbt indicative of an altzheimer's condition these days).Nishidani (talk) 02:30, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

Notice of Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard discussion

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a report involving you at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement regarding a possible violation of an Arbitration Committee decision. The thread is Nishidani. Thank you. Drsmoo (talk) 17:17, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Just as a matter of curiosity, what are you thanking me for?Nishidani (talk) 01:22, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Just for reference, the "Thank you" is baked into Template:AE-notice as well as all the other standard noticeboard "required notification" templates. Personally I think it comes off a little condescending, but it's been that way since 2007. The Wordsmith^{Talk to me} 01:35, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Now that could be a new tagline: Wikipedia: a little condescending since 2007. Levivich (talk) 20:05, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I guess, whatever the outcome over there, that I owe it, at least to myself, to spend some time writing up why these misprisions occur.I.e, how someone in good faith can see something and find it repugnant while others, equally in good faith, have no such impression. Nishidani (talk)

When I read over a half century ago what Theodor Adorno wrote in his Minima Moralia, with trenchant pithiness, something to the effect that 'to say we when one means I is one of the most recondite of insults,' I took the apophthegm to heart as a ruling guideline in life. Distracted at one point into the massive literature on ethnic identity, it assumed even greater cogency. What was nationalism, not only in its formal ideology but in the public language shaped under its muscled authority, if not a discursive mode where this core distinction was utterly lost, as its spokesmen made the most varied claims about what being part of an ethnic, cultural or political community entailed, for everyone captured up into its defining set. The 'we-ness' component trumped any trace of individualism. Before being oneself, one was one of us, and owed obeisance to the communal substrates' definition of who anyone in their ranks was,basically.Being some-one meant being primarily a member of a someone-else-ish national or ethnic group. One was defined by groupthink before one could even learn to find and articulate one's own voice.

Adorno's point held particular force for me because, reading widely in modern European history, and especially after encountering Jean-Paul Sartre's classic postwar text, Reflexions sur la question juive,the 'Jews' emerged as the outstanding example of what can happen when Others presume to define a minority community in their midst, otherwise as thoroughly acculturated as anyone else in a country, and by dominating as a we what they supposedly were, lay the bedrock for their eventual extermination, through sheer discursive carelessness over the longue durée.

In the slumbering toils of this late bespoke Woke world, itself the retarded offspring of an era of codifying politically correctness, the vast plain of the sayable is increasingly hemmed in, allotments staked out, taboo lines of no trespass roped off, by constituencies sharing little more than a common grievance over the way the parliament of language misrepresents them.Any discussion or remarks touching on the Jewish world furnishes no exception, and indeed perhaps presents an extreme instance of the pathologies one discerns more generally in identitarian debates, for which it provides, moreover a template for ethnic grievance strategies in recent decades. Perhaps arbitrarily I'd take 1967-1969 as marking a dividing line, when sensitivities underwent a radical shift. The former date refers to the fear and subsequent triumphant euphoria widespread in the diaspora at the outcome of the Six Days War. The latter alludes to the deserved success of Philip Roth's wonderfully vulgar, inimitably comical Portnoy's Complaint.

in the postwar era down to this juncture, people in the diaspora could grow up, as witness the autobiographical remarks of people like Norton Mezvinsky, Robert Manne and Ramona Koval alluded go in a prior section, completely unaware of any social interest in let alone antipathy to, the fact that one's background was Jewish. That was a private matter, one could even frequent Christian schools, and in so far as one had a national identity it was as an American, Australian etc. An engagement with Israel, let alone the holocaust was, in these early decades, very low key. Nishidani (talk) 12:55, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Unconstructive and unnecessarily inflammatory commentary

I'm sure you read the AE filing so I won't get too into the weeds, but try and keep commentary on point without rhetorical flourishes that can be misunderstood. There are a lot of people from a lot of backgrounds with a lot of views who've been exposed to a lot of information and have a lot of different take-aways on that information. Using phrases like "dumb goyim," regardless of your intent, is likely to turn into a big waste of time for everyone involved rather than moving the discussion forward. Please keep that in mind. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 12:01, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Fair enough. I did learn something, that a commonplace phrase for a genre of jokes in Israeli usage is considered inflammatory if alluded by someone outside the fold, as it can be resented in that changed context as suggesting hostility to Jews. I'm not in the habit of repeating one-off clichés, because that smacks of dull-minded harping and were I to do so it would certainly be an instance of stirring provocation, 'inflammatory' at least on Wikipedia for some users. As often, I come away from such unfortunate misprisions thinking, why did the plaintiff not raise his sensitivities on my page, where I would have taken them into consideration and reasoned through with them about a usage like that, which apparently is beloved by the fuckwits who pullulate in the lunatic fringes of antisemitic websites. I would have even cited an example from Belli, no.1373 (Er fagotto pe l'ebbreo) which mocks a dumb Christian for his fatuous ignorance of Jewish custom.Being asked to deliver some goods to the Jewish ghetto, a lad complains that it wasn't his fault for putting the package in the wrong hands there, because his employer had simply told him to deliver it to a certain Aron, providing his 'baptismal' name (I.e. his first name) and not the consignee's family name. To think that a Jew's first name is one he receives at baptism shows his Christian obtusity. Ah, much adieu with nothing gained. Regards Nishidani (talk) 13:03, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

AE rhymes with poetry

I enjoyed reading your poem. Out of curiosity, I copied and pasted your original prose comment into that infernal machine and asked it to rewrite it as a poem, and this is what it came out with (with only minor tweaks by me):

In a realm where words dance with intent,
AE ponders the stain the accusation lent.
For over a decade, this slur's been sent,
From editors, none victorious, who leave a scent,
A lingering cloud that whispers "Repent."

Chess, with a sly leap, adds a new layer,
Innuendos fly, a subtle flare.
"Perhaps not antisemitic," they dare,
"But you question identity," a wound to bear.
Provocation lingers, a silent snare.

Unproductive, they say, to respond in kind.
Yet the offense stings, a truth to find,
Repetitive whispers, a relentless grind,
Before the eyes of admins who find
A smear that echoes, leaving scars behind.

Though water off a duck's back, I claim,
The weight of repetition, a relentless game,
A subliminal poison, with a hidden aim,
To erode, to decay, to maim.
Tolerance wanes, as dignity's flame.

I like yours much better. But damn, is that good or what, from a computer? It understood what you were saying, and frankly, is capable of writing better poetry than probably like 99%+ of fluent English speakers. The computer's choice of monorhyming quintains surprised me. Anyway, thought you might get a kick out of it. Levivich (talk) 20:16, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

You should try going through some old archives to find some real gems. Can read about one of them at our electronic paper of record (the Signpost is really no competition tbh), ANI. nableezy - 20:28, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

So now we can say, "Back in my day, we didn't have AI to write angry ballads for us, we had to write them ourselves!" To which someone like Ben Franklin would reply, "Oh yeah? Try doing that with ink and a feather!" And I have to admit, it must have been very difficult to write an angry letter using something as delicate as a feather. I would have broken a lot of feathers. But if you wind the clock back further, I bet it was very satisfying to write out an angry letter using clay tablets and chisels. Especially when using bold for emphasis. You could probably tell a lot just by looking at how a message was chiseled, like, "Wow, he was really angry when he wrote this, look how deep the cuts are in this tablet!" Levivich (talk) 20:44, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

I'll try to get my pedantic mania offloaded or reined in into a footnote. Our Sumerian bard working off his furor poeticus would have dashed off his melodious ire on a soft clay tablet, wielding with deft speed a reed quill (Akkadian qantuppi, or something like that. I can't open another page on this laptop to check simultaneously as I write here).Chiselling came much later (though not financially) when imperial orderx commanded monumental narratives to be inscribed on rockfaces. Does anyone write good poetry in anger? Most early ancient poetry was composed in the style still preserved in the practice of Osip Mandelshtam, as his wife Nadezhda describes it, pacing up and down or along a street, murmuring various syllable and word combinations, until line after line the poem shapes itself in memory and, only then, is it written down or, as anciently, was recited and often committed to memory on the spot by the listeners. There's not much place for useless emotions like anger in these traditional modes, as anyone who has attended extempore bardic competitions in provincial Italian villages can attsst. Two or more oral poets stand before an audience, a theme is selected by lot, one takes it up, say 'war', and slowly but fluently produces two quatrains (abab) with tercets to round it off. The next poet must reply on theme by say praising by contrast its antithesis, playing off the ideas of his earlier rival,and this seemingly effortless to and fro can go one for hours. The sheer pleasure of technical challenges, the extraordinary level of concentration required to do this doesn't leave room for silly distemper, ire or anger,even were that the topical issue, as it is in the Iliad(mËnis).

Thanks indeed for that, Lev, a fascinating experiment that sent the mind milling, and set my day's mental menu as I trekked out with my sister for a long fast midday walk through the Moonah bushland foreshore off Anglesea. Coincidentally, it picked up a thread in an ongoing argument I'd had a year or so ago, with an Italian mate, an electronic engineer who ingeniously salvaged five decades of work on file when my computer crashed. As I think you have argued around here A1 is increasingly making editing wikipedia, let alone any form of discursive work (legal,academic, political etc ) ostensibly otiose, since fluent neutral content looks like it can be generated in seconds through merely posing the right request to a machine.

My counterargument consisted in several excursuses on language at its most intense, poetry, with the suggestion that A1 can't write poetry, as opposed to reformulating a universe of topical prosaic information with formidibly correct grammar. As I walked along that foreshore,eyes half distracted by the curves of the combers and a steady glance rightwards from time to time for brownsnakes (both of us being keen observers of reptiles), three phrases in particular came to mind as I wondered whether an algorithm would ever be capable of generating their dazzling imagery with the inimitable music instinct in each:('comme à travers une fêlure dans un paroi lisse, une fine craquelure, quelque chose se glisse doucement.' Nathalie Sarraute; (para thina paraphloisboio thalassẽs(Homer evoking the sound of crashing waves along a duned beach);('là dove'l sol tace,'Dante writing of a place 'where the sun falls silent')). This by way of a prefatory context setting, but it's time for a fag...Nishidani (talk) 05:57, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

The A1 machine can, it seems, reconstrue prose in a rhymed format, but while quite competent, maintains its prosaic character. At least, this is my impression of what I see so far. Prose is like a school uniform, it's language dressed into a uniform communicative code. Poetry is always, in sartorial terms, harlequin. Prose strives to get a rational line of argument over, poetry's rationality is addressed not primarily to a public constituency: It is an individual's wrestling dialogue with language itself, and the terms are not pitched in terms of discursive clarity, but rather higher criteria of metaphor,analogy, musicality,in a register of resonant ambiguity that resists 'closure', i.e., discursive dumbing down to a simple straightforward statement. A1 I assume has an inbuilt mathematicized design to privilege the reduction of a vast linguistic and discursive data base to a coherent, grammatical set of clear statements. That is diametrically opposed to what poetry does. Poetry's concept of meanings is plural -the deliberative interplay of otherwise distinct planes suddenly in dialogue because of the poet's unexpected juxtaposition of things we normally do not think off as in any way related. A very large volume of the greatest poetry is intertextual, yielding up its subtle semantic secrets only as one twigs to some implicit allusion to some other poem. A minimal reading of the games alive in Robert Frost's otherwise straightforward,'The road not taken' would take at least 20 pages of close annotation and construal. Dinner.Nishidani (talk) 09:30, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

To illustrate using bathos, by some of the jokes in my doggerel. (antisemitic) 'innuendoes' is written with an approximation to an old vernaculsr's phonetics, inyourendoes (the smear is like someone shoving it one's a***), or rumourous(guff) comes out as rumerus, because we thus become the noisy targets of 'rumour',who we are is effectively what we are rumoured to be. Perhaps I should cut to the chase and outline why 'dumbgoyim' came to my mind, out of Roth, not Hitler, as far as I can reconstruct my memories. By the way, the Wiki article on the WW2 soldiers' song Hitler Has Only Got One Ball is incomplete, also metrically weak. As recited by our father when we were kids, and he was there, the first line ran: 'Hitler has only one brass ball, ' and Goebbels was distorted to Joeballs. The quatrain was capped with a closing 'Pass the pisspot, Jerry/Mary!'Nishidani (talk) 10:09, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

When the 'animalistic' atrocities' by terrorists broke out on October 7, it didn't take more than a few minutes to imagine what would occur. A total and utter devastation of the Gaza Strip, massive civilian casualties, and a war to take control and command of the terms of tbe ensuing narrative of the conflict. When Yoav Gallant, was it, spoke of all Palestinians being 'animals' and zoomorphic imagery flooded Israel dehumanizing them, I recalled a list I had drawn up over a decade ago systematically documenting all the terms used by prominent Israelis referring to Palestinians as, when not a subspecies, a kind of two legged animal, or vermin, lice, etc. But I refrained from making n article on this, until some weeks ago when the situation became unambiguously genocidal. So much information about stereotypes reiterated in the Israeli press or social conversation were never covered and should be known. I happened to see the discussion about Bret Stephens while working on this animal imagery. He was being adduced as an RS on Hamas, widely reviled as 'animals' or 'vermin'. He was on record as defining Ashkenazi, a group to which he belongs, as showing superior intelligence or superior thinking abilities compared to non-Ashkenazim (goyim), He was known to strongly resent (and justifiably) once being called a 'bedbug', a vile analogy that, in dismissing him as an insect, smacked of the Nazi rhetoric of 'infestation'. He was arguing that the lifeline of UNWRA, without whose aid 80% of Gaza's Palestinians would face famine, instead of chronic stunting anaemia, should be cut. If he couldn't connect the obvious dots here, his resentment at being called derisorily a 'bedbug' and the widespread use in Israeli of similar terms for the Palestinians, asserting the superiority of Ashkenazim while calling for a systemic measure that would foreseeably reduce another people to famine, that he was incoherently treating his non-Jewish readership as 'dumb', ergo, when edit conflicts failed to get my more articulated argument about his dubiousness as an RS on Palestinians, the laconic 'dumb goyim', more Philip Roth given my reading interests,than Hitler. And certainly a phrasing, as Zero's link, incisively showed, quite at home in certain quarters of Israeli conversation. If one finds, and absorbs an abiding lesson from, the Nazi rhetoric of animals and insect infestation as applied to Jews, the lesson should be applied to all such reevocative analogies, regardless of ethnicity. This is just for the record and can I hope be dropped.Nishidani (talk) 14:20, 18 February 2024 (UTC)Nishidani (talk) 14:02, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

In any case any one word, esp.from the primary emotions, like 'anger,' 'jealousy' is just the tip of a semantic and subsemantic affective iceberg. I was reminded of this rereading Patrick O'Brien's Post Captain yesterday. Stephen Maturin is being described as lost in thought.

A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thought flashes into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols (cymbals,N?) inadequate. Because common to disparate situations-admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages of music and painting. Words were not called for in many or most forms of thought: Mozart certainly thought in terms of music. He himself at this moment was thinking in terms of scent.p.470

But I'd prefer to examine further the issue of A1 and whether or not its remarkable success with prose could ever be extended to the qualitatively difference medium of poetry. Goodnight, Lev, and thanks for a trenchant prompt that made me day, and will continue to do so in the following weeks as I reflect on it.Nishidani (talk) 14:20, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

On viewing people as animals, I can't help recalling a brilliant sonnet by Belli, a little of which I struggled to get over into my own dialect. Dialect cannot be euphemised,it can only be rendered by a dialect with a parallel status No 1394

Long before Adam, there ain't a shadda ra dout,

The clarse of anamuls, way oudduv'a gum'ment's reach,

Lived the life a Riley,n' getting by wuz a peach

With no bosses ta work ya like a fucken rouseabout.

There woddn't no coachies or hun'ers way back then,

No butchers,no bashens, or hangen round f'ra feed . . .

An, as fa speaken, the lodduv'em, evri last breed,

Spoke like boffins do now, jus' like learnéd men.

But then Adam bowled up and took over the reins,

An muskets an' wips turned up oudda the blu,

Along with coachies n' cudgels fa spadderen brayns.

An that was the very furst accayshun whereby man

Robbed anamuls a their speech, and then used it to screw

'Em with the power of reasun, as only speech can.Nishidani (talk) 14:49, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

I did 2279 of thosesonnets too fast for revision, so every time I pick one up it screams for improving tweaks. I.e. Rob is also 'knock off'/or 'nick which picks up the bashings/knocks and blows,'spattering brains' handed out to animals earlier. 'chew the cud' ruminate/think' (so animals readjusted to animulls, where 'mulls'( an anima which thinks) is audibly tacit)

An that wuz the very first time whereby man

Nocked words owda anamulls, so he alone cud chew

The cud, n' pud'em all down with tha voice a reason.Nishidani (talk) 03:09, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

which reminds me,

Had I but world enough and time,

I'd pull my finger out and write

A piece on the Jewish art of rhyme

In the dialect of Rome, to cure the blight

Of neglect that topic suffers here:

More ignorance than prejudice explains the lack

In coverage. We'd do well to lend an ear

To the verse of Crescenzo Del Monte, a crack

Acolyte of Belli's native tongue, who sought

To versify the Jewish world of Rome

In his shrewd ghettoed idiom and caught

So much that Belli missed or left alone

For very few have roots so deep, if fraught,

Than Roman Jews to call that city home.Nishidani (talk) 04:01, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for those translations! Are these the world's first Romanesco-to-Brogue translations? :-) It works wonderfully, though, for conveying the vernacular. I am in awe of people like Belli who can write thousands of sonnets.

Unfortunately so far I haven't come across a reliable source for the "brass balls" variation though it's all over the internet in non-RS sources, but nothing suitable for adding to the Wikipedia article that I've been able to find. "Joe Balls" was easier to source (and is mentioned in the Wikipedia article).

I'd never really thought about this before, but did, e.g. Allen Ginsburg write "Howl" in anger, or is it just about anger? I imagine the latter. Does it count if the first draft was written in anger? You've got me thinking of poets who might have written in anger, and Dylan comes to mind, but perhaps songs written in anger are different than poems written in anger. Still, I'd guess even angry songs are written calmly even if performed angrily. I would certainly count "Masters of War" as an "angry poem." It's angry when read (Google has the lyrics), and angry when performed--you can hear the anger when Dylan sings it (1963 example). Eddie Vedder hadn't been born yet in '63, but you can hear the anger when Vedder sang it almost 30 years later in '92. Still angry a couple of months ago when Patti Smith sang it while commenting that it was more relevant today than ever. But I think you're right, Dylan was probably calm when he composed it. He's still around, maybe I should write him an email and ask. Anybody got Dylan's email address? Levivich (talk) 07:02, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks indeed for these stimulating reflections, Lev.I must confess that when Ginsburg recited his work at the Melbourne Town Hall back in March '72 or thereabouts, l walked out half way through, though the tickets were hard to come by. I'd been annoyed at the ruckus caused by protests at the presence of Andrei Voznesensky, simply because he happened to be a citizen of the Soviet Union. Fortunately Voznesensky managed to fit in a recitation for students of Russian at the University, and I thrilled to his performance, the music and technical formalism of his work.

I and my mate walked out I guess as cultural snobs at that time (but we were serious drinkers back then and the long evening drawl was threatening our boozing schedule). We were both specializing in classical Greek and intoxicated by the extremities of technical bravura in Pindar's unbelievably complex verbal orchestration of image after image of recondite allusion, and Ginsburg's yawl seemed prosaic. My measure of quality was, if I can imagine myself doing that (in any creative medium) then I'm not impressed. It didn't help that the throng was highly political, longhaired dope-sucking hippies there because G was an icon of resistance,nothing to do with poetry -very few campus poets of that decade, to gather from a Time poll, could recite a poem, even their named favourite, from memory and Joseph Brodsky turned away droves from his classes unless they had several hundred lines off by heart. I was a radical, but never found myself comfortable in a crowd of the like-minded, and, damn it, poetry was an intensely private thing, requiring years of 'disciplined' listening to words, and the memorized tradition of its masters. As Auden once wrote, a great poet will write several hundred pages, much of it excellent, but only a baker's dozen will pass muster as the stuff of genius,enduring in time because the words make those who chance to hear or read them bristle with a physical thrill that makes the lines and images sear themselves into the thews of one's feeling and thinking. Must watch an evening flick with my sister, but I'll think about and eventually get back to, your remarks on anger: If only because it challenges Wordsworth tired but interesting (ultimately autobiographical) that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity.Nishidani (talk) 10:02, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Could bychance that infernal A1 machine you hang out with write a wikitype stub or article,trawling the net for stuff kn Crescenzo Del Monte? I guess most of it would be in Italian however Nishidani (talk) 10:09, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Read 'No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief' by Gerard Manley Hopkins. No one could read that near frantically suicidal pressure of abandoned hope and fraught existential plight without grasping the lived sincerity of the angst it describes. But that order of technical bravura though written out of that paralysing experience, probably wasn't drafted under its immediate impress. The 'composure' demanded by that order of control over the wording stands aside from the stuttered silent wroughtness such an emotion would have induced. Homer dedicates considerable space to the sledging vituperation Achilles spat out towards his lord Agamemnon, but not for tbat would Homer have necessarily had to draw on some memory of his own rage. When Shakespeare has Macbeth utter the words, as he girds himself for battle

I have supp'd full of horrors

Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts

Cannot once start me.

Can we infer that (biographical fallacy) Will is writing directly out of his personal experience, rather than just suiting words to the dramatic context and the fictive type his imagination has conjured up, also to fit a theatrical bill and its deadline? No, poetry is chameleonic, and enters like a quick-change artist into the spirit of the words that the experience latched upon for a theme suggests as most consonant with the mood of the poem. Nishidani (talk) 12:00, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

I shouldn't abuse wikispace by personal divagations, though indirectly such a conversation does trawl up possible projects, like the one I mentioned re Del Monte that demand some effort to create articles here. But your inquiry about anger discernibly present in what I wrote, from scruple, has had me thumbing back through the pages of memory to test the strength of such an impression. The first sonnet I wrote, in mid adolescence, in response to a demand for something imaginative as homework from our teacher in composition, led to my writing 14 taut rhymed lines from inside Oswald's mind as he lined up a shot through his sniper's telescope to blow Kennedy's brains out in Dallas.It received a good mark but the teacher handed it back to me with a troubled frown,which I took to mean that he was plying the worry beads as to whether or not the quiet, unengaged student, one of a pair, the other of whom was considered to be wild and uncontrollable, also had a hidden streak of violence. Well, we all do, at least in my ex-Catholic book, but that wasn't written in white heat. It responded to the shock of good men being slain - an emerging feature of world politics at the time Patrice Lumumba, Dag Hammarskjöld as well. I was soon seriously drawn to Buddhism, even entertaining the idea of training as a Tibetan monk, -it was godless which suited my native pagan insouciance to the spiritual -because it promised total detachment from evil(as well as a massive abundance of heroic poetry), but eventually was won over to the 'melancholy science' practiced by Theodor Adorno,whose otherwise intense patrician engagement with the problem of systemic evil, is always compellingly trenchant yet detached. I don't think, despite that lifetime focus on the devastating brutality of our world order, that he wrote from an agitated desk. He did, ironically, die, reportedly from an emotional incident - girls of a Marcusan persuasion stripped and flashed their breasts at him to mock his dry Marxist metaphysics, inducing his fatal heart attack. The old teaching the young find themselves, as George Steiner once remarked, embarrassed by an awareness of lineaments of an erotic undertow in the transmission of otherwise austere ideas, but letting it all hang out is lethal. Poetry, philosophy best works under the compressions of self-restraint: there's little room for allowing primary affects like anger to get the upper hand. Like the rare Sumatran tiger I had a chance to sit and study the other day at Ballarat (an opportunity to re-experience Rilke's amazing poem as well), such practices work by persistent restless but quiet padding along the confines of one's cage.Nishidani (talk) 00:29, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

I can't disagree: composition is too much of a science to do while angry, even the composition of anger.

To answer your question: no, the fancy spellchecker cannot write a stub about Crescenzo Del Monte. I asked it to, and it wrote a stub that began "Crescenzo Del Monte (born June 12, 1985) is an Italian entrepreneur and philanthropist known for his contributions to the technology sector and charitable endeavors" and went from there. To say the machine "hallucinates" is unfair to the machine: it doesn't hallucinate so much as it simply isn't programmed to know or care about truth. It doesn't write an article, it writes what looks like an article, by reading a lot of other articles and imitating them.

And that's also how it writes a poem: it doesn't so much write a poem as write something that looks like a poem. It isn't really capable of true creativity. It can generate text that is new, but not truly creative. For example, the line "To erode, to decay, to maim," which I quite like, appears to be genuinely new in the sense that this particular string of text does not appear anywhere on the internet according to Google. But the construction isn't terribly creative. "To X, to Y, to Z" is not particularly a new pattern or idea ("to die, to sleep / to sleep, perchance to dream" was written like 400 years ago and I'm sure there are older examples in older languages). The machine read lots of poems that used that construction, and it replaced the X/Y/Z with new words.

Which is why I don't think it will be replacing human authors anytime soon. But it is pretty good at transforming text from one form to another, e.g. prose to poetry, or ask it to explain something complicated to you as if you were X years old, and it'll write age-appropriate text, which I find a useful tool when I am having trouble explaining complicated things to morons others. Levivich (talk) 04:02, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

If it can downdumb things for morons, then it's just the thing I need to save face in some technical areas, where I'm way out lf my depth, or rather my shallows:) My dearest niece and her companion, editors/translators, find it a very useful ancillary or handknave in their work.I tend to be sceptical of claims that technology cannot replicate, indeed wholly substitute with competitive success, the creativity of man, because a friend wrote a work demonstrating the limits of A1some decades ago, onky to see the strictures undermined within a decade or so. But that will constitute a different order of 'being', with its distinctive 'culture', to historic man under conditions of natural evolution.

My little sister just brought a cup of tea to my desk, catching me as I wiped my nostril with a tissue, and asked:'What's causing that, 'Nish'?, and of course I shot back,'Who knows!!' If A1 learns to be sufficiently sensitive to language to make even bad puns like that, it will prove to be a wonderful companion for future generations, Given the general decay in conversation. Speaking of which, 'to erode, decay, to maim' slips up in sandwiching 'decay', an intransitive verb, between two transitives, 'erode' and 'maim' (and following up the end rhyme, 'maim' with wanes' too quickly, internal rhyme, in the following halfline) Perhaps its scouring of the lexicon fished this obsolete use of 'decay' transitively from Shakespeare, but that insensitivity to the temporal resonance of words somewhat jars the otherwise impressive effect.

I'm afraid I'm drawing rather exhaustingly on your own personal time and should draw this thread to a close. A final dose of Belli, to thank you should do the trick, since you have graciously allowed that there is some merit in my experiments with that untranslatable genius (Italian scholarship places him on a par with Dante, while recognizing he will always remain the preserve of just a small coterie of specialists and amateur enthusiasts)

It's jus' past sparrah-fart, tha Pope's sed mass.

Full uz a bull's bum with brekkie, mumblen a prayer,

His Holy Paunch, in slippers an a tatty dress

Waddles outside f'ra breather of fine air.

In 'is garden, there's this ugly bird a prey

A nasty sunuvabitch tied up to a chain.

An' nearby'im, in a copper cage, they say,

Are a baker's duz of duvlets fed on grain.

So, wodduz 'is 'ighness do? He plunges 'is paws

Insid'a that cage, n' grabs a bird, n' chucklen, puts

The chick plum down in'a that mungrel's claws.

Our Lord gets a buzz frum gloaten, as its guts

get torn by that buzzard's beak, an' he's all applorze

As its heart's pecked out, quiveren at the cuts.

'sparrows' fart' = dawn;'duvlets' = fledgling doves

Thanks again, Lev, and best regardsNishidani (talk) 06:52, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks Nish I enjoyed it! (And that Pope reminds me a bit of Wikipedia...) Levivich (talk) 14:52, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Notes for

Re Media coverage of the Israel–Hamas war. This article so far is totally inadequate, given the serious overviews correlating thematic emphases with specific changes in the war. Such issues cannot be adequately covered by episodic tidbits. The following provide useful guidelines to the topic. Any additions that consist of links to studies on the coverage blackout of the realities of the conflict in the Israeli media in particular would be appreciated.

• Eyal Lurie-Pardes Journalism out, hasbara in: How Israeli TV news joined the Gaza war effort, +972 magazine 6 March 2024
• Ryan Grim, "WCNSF: The Most Haunting Acronym t he World Has Produced", The Intercept 2 March 2024.

Nishidani (talk) 07:21, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

New article

Negative Terms for Palestinians in Israeli discourseCrampcomes (talk) 07:35, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I haven't been able to address this due to being bedridden with back problems, perhaps due to some hours practising to see if my golf swing was intact (oddly enough it is) after never having touched an iron for 30 years, and this a day before a 24 hour flight had me squeezed into an uncomfortable seat. All being well, I'll rewrite it in the next day or two.Nishidani (talk) 08:39, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

It's fine if you rewrite it, the article in its current state is pretty much non-encyclopedic (and has been WP:BLAR), but the history is still there if you wish to use the sources to rewrite it in a more encyclopedic way. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 09:38, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I've already written the article, over a decade ago. I just don't rush any work dealing with delicate issues to make some urgent point, unlike so many editors in this area. The stub would have been totally rewritten according to the most rigorous wiki standards in a very short time had some patience been exercised.Nishidani (talk) 09:42, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm a little confused. You're saying you wrote the article more than a decade ago and yet it was published by another editor today? Also if an article is not suitable for mainspace it can be edited in draftspace prior to publication. If that had been done maybe an article of such poor quality would not have caused concern to many editors. AusLondonder (talk) 09:56, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I make notes as I read, and, over a decade of reading about the I/P conflict, my file on animal metaphors grew substantially, indicating it was a significant theme. So I wrote up my notes, listing what RS addressing this usage state. That was 10 years ago. I'm not a tearaway POV pushing editor. I take my time, and had noted on some talk page three months into the present war that, given the explosion of contemptuous dismissal for Palestinians as subhuman in senior Israeli discourse (documented also by the recent SAfrican case before the ICJ), it was perhaps time for me to re-organize my material for a wiki article. I was away from my computer for 3 months, and now I see Crampcomes has apparently taken a leaf out of my earlier suggestion and sketched out a stub, hoping I might wikify it and add my material. My impression is that the extreme haste in TNTing the article reflects a total unfamiliarity with how deep and widespread this kind of terminology is in Israeli discourse, coming from very authoritative quarters. That is comprehensible, since, unlike anything negative associated with Palestinians, this kind of material is underreported in the news, though well-known to specialists. That is why wikipedia needs an article on it, which I will presently supply. Nishidani (talk) 11:02, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Feel free to write a comprehensive article if you want. TNTing wasn't to prevent anyone from writing the article, or even because the stub wasn't complete or extensive enough, it was because a lot of the things written on it were dubious and needlessly inflammatory. If you want to write about the (well-documented) Israeli dehumanization of Palestinians, there is certainly a lot of material to use, but many of the article's sources simply did not verify the (very strong) claims made there. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 11:05, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

You still have time to rewrite the stub if you want. The current version of the article (obviously inappropriate) doesn't show in mainspace anymore, but that doesn't prevent you from working on rewriting the article. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 11:02, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Nishidani, I hope you feel better soon. 30 years is a very long time but I guess once a pro, always a pro.Crampcomes (talk) Crampcomes (talk) 11:39, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. The proper title would be Animal stereotypes of Palestinians in Israeli discourse which I cannot now work on because it just supplies a redirect to another general article. If someone could do me the courtesy of annuling the redirect, so that my proposed title becomes redlinked, I will start writing the article under that rubric.Nishidani (talk) 11:05, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

You can still work on it at the noredirect version of the page. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 11:07, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm also not opposed to a properly-sourced article that's not original research and not a list of individual offensive things people said (and didn't say, as I kept finding for many of the claims I tried to verify). That wasn't what was created and it shouldn't have been in mainspace. I don't edit particularly frequently in this topic area, I saw the page at NPP. But an article like that must have perfect sourcing or it'll just cause conflict. Have you considered working on it as Draft:Your title? AusLondonder (talk) 11:21, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I have begun transferring my material into mainspace. All of the terms referred to in the original stubs reflect usage commonplace in Israel, and it is not original research to list the varieties of stereotypical insults duly reported in reliable sources. As noted in my recent edit summary, it would be appreciated if editors exercised a little patience as the article is written up.Nishidani (talk) 11:55, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

The article as it currently stand consists of two sentences. [5] The first sentence cites a source showing that Israelis and Palestinians have long been using similar dehumanising terms about each other. The second provides a single instance of this, regarding the use by Israelis of such terms during the current ongoing conflict. Can I ask what the reasoning is for singling this instance out, rather than covering the broader topic as laid out in the first sentence? Wouldn't it be more appropriate, and a lot easier to avoid accusations of partisanship, if instead the discourse of all involved was discussed, leaving it to sources we cite (I'm sure there must be plenty of academic work at least touching on it) to present examples, and to offer commentary on any asymmetry etc they may perceive. Or do we have to have a mirror-image Negative Terms for Israelis in Palestinian discourse to cover the entire topic? I'd have to suggest that the latter approach was not only unnecessary forking of what is academically a single topic (and part of a much broader one), but more or less guaranteed to lead to the endless bickering that blights this topic area. AndyTheGrump (talk) 12:11, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure why you weren't willing to start this work in draftspace, now we have an article that's already got quite a few issues back in mainspace. It's also got back the quote taking the Defence minister's comments about "cannibals" out of context, with the way its worded implying that Hamas are "their...(Palestinians) leaders" which is itself controversial. AusLondonder (talk) 12:39, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

I give the quote, the leaders of the Gazans are members of Hamas, and the quote is appropriate. This is pointless niggling. Allow me to work.Nishidani (talk) 13:08, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

What appears to you to be "pointless" is important when discussing such a controversial topic. And, while Hamas effectively controls the Gaza strip, this is not recognized internationally, and your formulation implies that members of Hamas are leaders of the Gazans/Palestinians as a people, which many would disagree with. Chaotıċ Enby (talk · contribs) 13:13, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Please. The administrative power in Gaza for the last 18 years has been Hamas. It runs everything. As such, whether you or l like it or not (I don't), the Hamas governorate leads those people under its administration.Nishidani (talk) 13:17, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

While we've all agreed this broad topic may be notable, I increasingly have the feeling it won't be with this article and it won't be by you. It seems like you just don't understand collaborative editing, unfortunately. AusLondonder (talk) 13:41, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Is there a reason you cant use a talk page to discuss article content? Your feelings arent something that you need to share with Nishidani. nableezy - 13:44, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for that input. AusLondonder (talk) 13:47, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

dunam by dunam

Finally found a source in my random reading to undergird my understanding of the cognitive puzzle I find in the inability to grasp the repetitious obviousness of the tragedy unfolding since 1967 (coming from the theory of остранение in one vein of modern aesthetic theory). Its neurological basis. Analogy with Nazism is not the point, that is only the authors' most dramatic instancing of this everyday scotoma via habituation that afflicts us all as a natural consequence of the the normative economy of evolutionary adaptations to our perception of the world.

For Milton Mayer’s staggering book about the rise of Nazism, for example, a man who lived in Germany at the time described the regime to the author: “Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse.” He added: “If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. … But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next.” Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein, 'Why People Fail to Notice Horrors Around Them,' The New York Times 26 February 2024 Nishidani (talk) 00:00, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

• In May 2023, a clear template to destroy a national group was proposed by Jeffrey Camras in an article in the Times of Israel. Camras proposed that “in order to right a wrong, in order to make peace and move forward, Palestine must be obliterated.” “It is an afront to society, morality, humanity,” he continued. “It represents lies and antisemitism, oppression and terror. Nothing more.” Camras also insisted that “the Palestinians need to be reeducated,” and that if Palestinians would like to enjoy rights, they must give up their nationhood, which constitutes “a lie.”Raz Segal, Luigi Daniele, Gaza as Twilight of Israel Exceptionalism: Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Unprecedented Crisis to Unprecedented Change Journal of Genocide Research 5 May 2024

The whole article, premised on the view that, if what Israel is doing constitutes genocide, holocaust exceptionalism will implode, is worth reading.Nishidani (talk) 15:45, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

• Nicholas Kristof, ‘People Are Hoping That Israel Nukes Us So We Get Rid of This Pain,’ New York Times 9 March 2024 Nishidani (talk) 12:21, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the calculus of how many hundreds of thousands of people are being starved deliberately to death, like the young PhD candiddate and his family here, makes the outcry over 130 hostages inaudible because the high pitch of sensitivity over the latter comes with a thudding silence re the former, and the only difference is ethnic.Nishidani (talk) 12:32, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

• Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, the head of the Hesder Shirat Moshe Yeshiva in Jaffa said in a yeshiva conference on Thursday that the entire population in the Gaza Strip should be killed. Head of Jaffa yeshiva says all Gazans should be killed Haaretz 9 March 2024 Nishidani (talk) 12:32, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

• Programmatic genocide. How it's done. Philippe Lazzarini, the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) chief, stated that Israeli forces had turned back a truck loaded with aid to northern Gaza “because it had scissors used in children’s medical kits.” “Medical scissors are now added to a long list of banned items the Israeli Authorities classify as ‘for dual use’,” he wrote on X. “The list includes basic and lifesaving items: from anesthetics, solar lights, oxygen cylinders and ventilators, to water cleaning tablets, cancer medicines and maternity kits,” the UNRWA chief said. Last week, Israel also denied the entry of 1,350 U.K.-funded water filters to Gaza, considering them “a threat.” Mustafa Abu Sneineh, Israel blocks aid to Gaza because of ‘medical scissors’ Mondoweiss 12 March 2024Nishidani (talk) 10:29, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
• Harvard University is awash with anti-Semitism, of course, like every other institute of higher learning. (Rene Marsh, Matt Egan, 'Facing unprecedented subpoena, Harvard submits more documents to Congress in antisemitism probe,' CNN 5 March 2024)

• However, Jared Kushner’s talk there in February aroused no antisemitic incidents, apparently. He said that Gaza had lots of “very valuable” waterfront property, presumably speaking of the flattened landscape to the north of the Strip now under Israeli occupation.and that 1.4 million in the South could be shifted out into the Negev or Egypt ‘to shield them’ from Israel. (Of course, and thereby double the perceived real estate value of the territory) Peter Bergen, ' What world is Jared Kushner living in?,' CNN 21March 2024

The question in the title is rhetorical. Kushner dwells in the real world, unlike the fanners of the new witchhunting wave of antisemitism claimants, now at pandemic or tidal proportions.Nishidani (talk) 11:35, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Probable accidental change to another editor's comment

This recent edit includes what is probably an accidental change to another editor's comment. Just letting you know, an old Mac of mine used to do this all the time - make rogue edits! Pincrete (talk) 10:01, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

I'd just got up and used the dinky laptop in my kitchen which likes to wipe out posts, refuses to paste and copy and gets up to other tricks. Thanks for the heads-up-Cheers Nishidani (talk) 13:15, 23 March 2024 (UTC)